For promise controllers I use the ones still available on their website.
http://www.promise.com/single_page_session/pa … S&m=722&rsn=144
All their Sata I Controllers with the exception of the SX series have 9x drivers, but they will not work with SATA III drives, they will not negotiate speed down to I levels and simply lockup. All their ATA100\133 IDE controllers appear as SCSI controllers too, and work fine with large drives. Maxtor used these for their ATA 133 controllers, just re-branded, so you can flash them to these and use the promise drivers.
That's the latest problem I ran into, and it wasn't just with the promise controllers, all my via ones had the same problem.
You can get the 9x drivers for sata I Via controllers here.
http://download.viatech.com/en/support/driversSelect.jsp
I did some research and found that the SIL3512 is one of the only Sata I controllers that will get along with Sata III drives, it has a bios as late as 2008, and still supports 9x just not with its latest drivers. Just scroll down the list till 2007 for the 9x\NT4 drivers.
You can get all its drivers and bios here.
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/
The Sil3112\3114 might support sata III drives but I'd need one to test it 🤣 but it also has a much latter bios with a date of 2008 and 9x support.
Why not use a Sata II controller you ask... Try finding one with 9x support, I don't know of one that does, and sata III drives won't let you set a jumper to slow them down to I speeds, just II.
Theres no steps you just install the driver for the contoller after loading 9x, its not like NT.
The drives will function in MS-DOS mode till the driver is installed.
You partition all the drives with G-Parted Or Freedos's FDISK, first tho.
Then format them with 9x's Format, which will display the incorrect size, but still proceed. It will be the correct size of the partition when its done, despite what it says.
If you don't use 9x's format.exe you will need to disable scandisk on boot, as it will give false errors constantly, and take an ridiculous amount of time to scan the drive.
As for enabling DMA mode with an external controller, you don't have to, the controller does it, there's actually no option for you to do it yourself.
Because to 9x they are appearing as a SCSI device once the driver for the controller is loaded.