Greetings,

a while ago the onboard IDE controller in my PC went haywire - the
BIOS saw all the drives (2 hard drives, CD-ROM, DVD-R), but wouldn't
boot, and booting from DOS reported all sort of crap about the hard
drives. So I put in a Promise Ultra133 TX2 card, put the HDs on its
IDE1 port, re-installed Windows 98, and despite several mysterious
error messages during the install, everything came up roses... except
that CD drives behave weirdly, exhibiting tremendously slow data
transfer (10 minutes to copy 150 Mb off a CD while audibly spinning at
normal speed) and producing various errors ("can't read from specified
drive," "error while reading data," etc.). I decided that this had to
mean that the onboard secondary IDE channel was also fried, and moved
the CD drives to the Promise card, too, since it's supposed to support
ATAPI. (So now there's nothing on the mobo's IDE channels, and they're
disabled in the BIOS.)

After that, the rate of problems decreased substantially, but they're
still there, so I decided on a clean re-install with all the data
running through the card. Problem is, I need to boot in DOS to do
that, and MSCDEX can't find the CD drives on the card. (I tried the
Win98 boot disk and a couple of those found on bootdisk.com.) Anybody
know how to teach it to do that?

Also, while searching for a solution on the Web and Usenet, I
encountered user advice not to attach any CD devices to Promise cards.
I wonder if anyone has done so successfully.

Many thanks,
Yisroel