Just a follow up on how things worked out with trying to get the Promise
EIDE MAX II card installed into this older computer.

I was able to get a partial success, finally.  I can get the Promise card to
see and work with both a 2gb hard drive and an ATAPI IDE CD-ROM.  I did this
by disabling the connector on the original connector card and by attaching
the drives to the connectors on the Promise card.  I found that I had to use
just one device per connector.  For some reason, the BIOS fails to detect
the second device if it is attached to the same connector as a slave.  I
tried this both with the CD-ROM and with another hard drive.  I tried both
the usual Master and Slave settings, as well as the Master with Slave
Present setting.

Although this is much less than optimal, since I had hoped that this set up
would be capable of handling up to 6 IDE devices, instead of only 2, it is
good enough to work with.

The tentative plans are to use it as a text-only OS machine running MS-DOS
and some old programs available for it and also to install Linux in order to
see more of what it has to offer.

I may be back with new questions when I get around to trying to set up the
dual boot configuration for these two operating systems.

By the way, my checking into the vendor linked from the MR BIOS site didn't
lead to what I had hoped for.  I was thinking there might be a new mb BIOS
chip that could be installed.  After talking with one of the vendor's reps,
all they could suggest was their own BIOS update card.  I was skeptical as
to whether it would be able to do any better than the Promise card, so I
didn't take it them up on it.

Still waiting to hear back from Promise Tech Support.  :-)

Thanks again for the helpful responses.

John

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