Yes! You'd just need to have a card that has a boot ROM, matter of fact, I have a system that has an AHA-2940U2W in it, with the system HDD connected to it. No drivers are needed for the system to boot from the SCSI card.

Though in some instances you may have to load a driver after the system boots.

yeah, using an adaptec card with BIOS like the 2940 series to install windows 95 and up is really "plug and play" as long as there are drivers on the bootdisk for your card. everything is pretty much handled automatically, so SCSI gets a bit of a bad rap for no reason here really.

you only need to load drivers for the cdrom if you intend to use realmode DOS, but that's just a few lines in config.sys and everything is described in the help files for the adaptec dos drivers.

Awesome thanks guys, I'm going to give it a shot if I an find an adapter for a good price. How would I know for certain it has a boot rom?

Chadti99 wrote on 2021-03-29, 20:27:

How would I know for certain it has a boot rom?

I used to boot from AHA-1542s back in the early 1990s and with those you can see the boot ROMs on the board

Chadti99 wrote on 2021-03-29, 18:20:

Is it possible on a socket 3 or Socket 7 system? I've used an Adaptec SCSI controller and CDROM ages ago and I remember having to load drivers for the adapter and CDROM of course. Can you boot direct from a SCSI HD with an add on controller without drivers? Is there a guide someone can point me to?

Booting from a SCSI HD should not be a problem as long as it has a ROM chip containing a BIOS. Perhaps you have to change the boot order in your motherboard's BIOS.
Booting from a SCSI CDROM is another thing.