So I have a Pentium Pro system with a SCSI hard drive on an Adaptec 2940u2w. The system originally had an IDE optical drive, and I installed Windows 98 without any trouble from it as my BIOS supports boot from CD-ROM. Fast forward a while, I replaced the IDE optical with a SCSI optical, and it worked fine in the system.

Just today my SCSI hard drive died. So I replaced it with another SCSI hard drive, and I got my Windows 98 CD to start the install. That's when problems occurred. The SCSI BIOS on the Adaptec controller renames the optical drive the A: drive when it detects a bootable CD. And while the Windows 98 CD booted, it actually couldn't find itself once I was at the install screen. It kept telling me to insert the Windows 98 CD. I suspected this had something to do with my optical being renamed A: and Windows 98 being too stupid to look anywhere other than D:

So I try something else...

I turn off the bootable CD feature in the SCSI BIOS (to prevent it from being named A:), and then I change the bootable device ID in the SCSI BIOS from 0 (my hard drive) to 2 (my optical). Well, turns out the controller doesn't really care that it's set to 2 instead of 0--it still only tries to boot off the hard drive.

I go back to my motherboard BIOS and make sure CD-ROM is set first in the boot order. But that doesn't help because the motherboard BIOS is too stupid to look for a CD-ROM on anything other than its own IDE controller.

So it seems I'm stuck. Other than buying another IDE optical drive, is there any way I can get this to work?