First post, by Technomancer21
Legend has it that there is forgotten ancient wisdom to be found here, I ask of ye gurus, for I am in need of thy sagely wisdom!
Okay, I had my fun with speech craft, but seriously, I've finally got my retro box reassembled and I've run into a brick wall trying to get the cdrom drive to work.
Now I am trying to use the IDE header on my soundcard to run the cdrom because my motherboard doesn't seem to like the cdrom and the fixed disk on the one cable.
Now before anyone says anything, I've already googled the problem I have, and I am fully aware that most early model soundcards did not infact have actual IDE headers but instead proprietary connections, my soundcard is an awe32 CT3910 and I can assure you all that it is most definitely an IDE header as labelled on the card and in the documents provided by creative (who knew they still had manuals and drivers available 😳)
Now that that's out of the way, the problem itself: whenever I have a cdrom connected to the soundcard, the system tries to use it as the default boot device. Always and without fail, it completely ignores the fixed disk present and configured in bios, and asks for a system disk instead of booting.
Now I may not have much experience with retro stuff but I'm pretty sure this isn't the right behaviour.
Just to be absolutely sure though, I connected my fixed disk to the soundcard instead of the mobo, and the system simply couldn't detect it at all. Yet when I boot the system with nothing connected to that header at all, it works like a charm and boots to dos without issue.
I find this very confusing...
Does anyone here have any idea what's going on?