Win98SE, IDE1=CD/RW Master, IDE2=C:\WD40Gig Primary Master, D:\WD120Gig Slave, SCSI WD7193 with WD7296a MiniPortDriver running Quantum 1.08Gig SCSI ID=4. WITHOUT SCSI drive energized, system runs fine, SCSI card recognized, SCSI Bios installed, no SCSI drives detected as it should be. Plug in the SCSI drive, reboot and POW! "No system drive". Boot with disk, C: No system drive, D: there is the SCSI drive but hangs reading second half of Directory. Reboot, same thing. Award Bios 4.51F latest Update (F4) Boot sequence set to A, CDROM, C. Seems that SCSI card is upstaging the IDE chain and no way in Bios to force IDE first. Any ideas? Thanks.

I thaught as a general rule you couldnt mix IDE and SCSI?

I know it's possible to use both IDE and SCSI, in fact it's working for me right now on a fileserver. I did run into one problem, however. The ATA66 PCI card stole the boot interrupt from the SCSI card. When I set the BIOS to boot from SCSI, it would try to boot the primary master on the PCI controller. I imagine your problem is related in some way.

No reason that scsi and ide can't co-exist and in fact have for years.

Pretty unusual having the cdrw as master and the c: drive as slave to it. Normally the drive is master.

First thing I would check is how is the scsi chain terminated. Do you have a active terminator at the end of the ribbon cable? If not get one and install it. Disable any termination on the scsi drive.

You should be able to set boot order in the bios. Floppy, ide0, scsi for example.

Since the drive is at id4, and unless you have a card that allows you to set the boot id from something other than id0 I would suspect you have having a drive enumeration issue.

The rule is the ide devices are enumerated first then [those with a bios] are enumerated 2nd. So you should have c: [ide0], d: [ide1] and then the scsi drive.

A suggestion would be to wipe the scsi drive of all partitions and then reboot. See if you have the drive access issue. If this solves the issue when you recreate the partition on the scsi drive only make it an extended partition not a primary. This should stop any drive letter assignment until after the ide drives are enumerated.

Also a motherboard slot farthest from the power supply usually has a lower priority. Moving the scsi card to such a slot might correct any hardware assignments concerning ide/scsi priority.

Thanks Wanderer, The CD-RW is Master on IDE1 and is the only item on it, on IDE2 is the Primary Master with OS and Slave is the Data Drive.

There was mention elsewhere that the Maxtor (Promise Ultra)ATA133 card I was using registers itself as a SCSI card so I have moved the drive cables to the m/b --same results. The SCSI cable has active termination, the drive is NOT terminated and the SCSI card ID#7 is automatically terminated.

In BIOS, Award 4.51PG, I can select a combination of drive LETTERS, SCSI, CDRom, etc. but NOT IDE chains themselves. On IDE 2 is the C:\ Master/Primary/OS and the Slave data drive. I am NOT trying to boot from the SCSI drive as it is single letter extended partition not primary as it was a data drive.

With the IDE drives energized as well as the SCSI drive, the boot shows the IDE chain correctly then loads the SCSI Bios and correctly identifies the SCSI Drive, then when it gets to the last item before the Win98 splash screen, it reports "Updating ESCD....Success" and then "Verifying DMI Pool" and there it STOPS! Clicking F8 to try for Safe Mode flashes the diskette drive but doesn't go forward. Putting in a Win98 StartUp disk and then hitting F8 starts the StartUp disk, loads and when C:\ is accessed, reports, "Invalid Media Type" Abort, Retry, Fail. Calling D:\ reports "Volume in Drive D is SCSI_QF_G" and giving it a Dir comand lists the 8 directories and 0 Files, but then HANGS hard and does not return the command prompt and the drive clicks away......

The SCSI card is in the last PCI slot.

So I can have the IDE drives running fine with the SCSI drive power unplugged but with it plugged in, it seems to kill the IDE chains. Any way around that? Thanks.