I have a 486  AST Advantage Pro ....circa 1994.

It has a simplistic proprietary bios which was written by Award but is
specific to AST Advantage PCs.
It has a on board IDE controller. I use this PC to run different Dos disk
utilities and I have installed two mobile drive bays..for a one channel
Master / Save setup....there is a 240 meg IDE hard drive that I use as a
master primarily because it has the same jumper settings for Master alone
and Master with slave.....no CD ROM and a stripped down Win95 install.

In order to be able to run large hard drives and to speed up HD
identification in the mobile drive bays I installed a Promise Enhanced IDE
controller. I had hoped to use this as a secondary channel allowing me to
have up to four drives....but this didn't work out. The Promise did update
the old Bios for large drives but the old Bios goes though a HD initiation
process that takes  a long time and often hangs ....this defeats the
primary purpose of the Promise controller which was to make this existing
controller allow for large hard drive support.....auto identification
....and quick drive changes. In addition the second channel wasn't working
well....I couldn't get a CD ROM to work ......so I disabled the on board
controller...jumpered the Promise as a primary EIDE controller and plugged
my master drive bay into it. Now I have the Promise as the only
Controller...singe channel....add in card.
This approach works but I can't get out of Dos compatibility mode with the
Promise run like this in win 95.
I have tried removing and reinstalling the 95 HD controller.......changing
settings in the PC bios as add in....integrated...etc...but I can not get
the setup to work like a modern controller and also run in 32 bit protected
mode. Promise tech support has been no help.

Prior to the Promise I was using a GSI add in controller that worked fine
..but it was single channel. and did not update the existing PC Bios
allowing for two channels so when it died I got the Promise.
However the GSI did run just fine in the configuration I am now trying to
duplicate with the Promise so I know it is not inherently impossible with
this PCs Bios.
Anybody have any ideas?

M

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