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Which PCI IDE Controller has configurable HDD boot selection?

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First post, by p6889k

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I'm trying to find a PCI IDE Controller with its own BIOS supporting LBA drives and ATAPI that also has Boot Menu to select which HDD to boot from. I tried to look at the manual for various Promise Ultra controllers, but none of the manuals cover this topic, they only cover driver installation. For example, anyone knows if it's supported with Promise Ultra 133 TX2 with 2 IDE channels? How about Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus? Also needs to have DOS support for ATAPI CD-ROM.

Thank you.

EDIT: see my second post on this thread clarifying Boot Menu vs configurable boot drive selection in the card's BIOS

Last edited by p6889k on 2020-10-05, 17:08. Edited 2 times in total.

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Reply 1 of 6, by _UV_

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Boot menu is a "fancy new thing" which was implemented in MB BIOS. With old SCSI controllers you can select preferred ID to boot from. I never had those Promise devices, but i suppose they don't have such feature, since it was not necessary at that time. And they still "server" equipment, so that feature should be implemented like on real SCSI - predefined choice.

Reply 2 of 6, by p6889k

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I'll clarify, I don't expect to find adapter with a modern boot menu, I'm looking for a card that has at least configurable BIOS to select boot drive when multiple drives are attached. I have an Intel VS440FX motherboard that assumes that Primary Master is the boot drive and won't let me change that to any other drive even in BIOS. Newer BIOSES allowed to specify boot order and even newer ones had boot menu without having to go to BIOS. I changed the title of the post to clarify.Thank you.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, 48k+, 128k, +2
Amiga 1200, 68030/40mhz
386DX/33, ET4000, SBPro2, MT32
Dual PPro/200, Millennium II, Voodoo 2, AWE32, SC-55
etc.

Reply 3 of 6, by quovadis11

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Why don't you use SCSI? if you already have lots of IDE hdds, I can go down.
But if you setting new computer environment, I recommend the SCSI interface for old multiple hard disk systems . There are so many cheap SCSI interface cards and SCSI hdds these days, works perfectly on MS-DOS.

Reply 5 of 6, by p6889k

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quovadis11 wrote on 2020-10-06, 03:26:

Why don't you use SCSI? if you already have lots of IDE hdds, I can go down.
But if you setting new computer environment, I recommend the SCSI interface for old multiple hard disk systems . There are so many cheap SCSI interface cards and SCSI hdds these days, works perfectly on MS-DOS.

Yeah, I have bunch of IDE and SATA drives that I want to uses. Thanks for the advice though.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, 48k+, 128k, +2
Amiga 1200, 68030/40mhz
386DX/33, ET4000, SBPro2, MT32
Dual PPro/200, Millennium II, Voodoo 2, AWE32, SC-55
etc.

Reply 6 of 6, by p6889k

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jakethompson1 wrote on 2020-10-08, 00:23:

Why not go find "Smart Boot Manager" and install it onto the first drive? It will let you do this with any controller. It even lets 486 machines (usually) do cd-rom boot.

I may resort to that, typically i just prefer to manually switch boot drive in BIOS on my other machines and keep each drive fully bootable on its own without relying on additional software. It can get tricky depending on the various OSes.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, 48k+, 128k, +2
Amiga 1200, 68030/40mhz
386DX/33, ET4000, SBPro2, MT32
Dual PPro/200, Millennium II, Voodoo 2, AWE32, SC-55
etc.

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