Played with this some more. Both the add in cards have their own bios. Their bios can't be disabled. Their raid is not configured so they act as dumb paddles. All bios are up to date. Referring to the below map... - If I swap the position of the cards it won't boot from cd. - If I swap the position of the cards and yank the drives off the 20269, its bios doesn't load and the system boots from cd. - Of course removing the 20269 boots from cd. Booting off the hard drive works fine in all combinations. So I'm pretty sure this is a BTX loader problem involving bios scans? BTX stops right after detecting the ich4 devices... bios cd is cd0 bios drive a: is disk0 bios drive c: is disk1 _ This config boots fine from cd and is now in use: mobo: dell bluford onboard pata: <Intel ICH4 UDMA100 controller> pri m: udma66 s: - sec m: cdr s: dvdrw pci nearest cpu: <SiI 3114 SATA150 controller> 1: drive 2: - 3: drive 4: - 5: - 6: - 7: - 8: - pci next nearest cpu: <Promise PDC20269 UDMA133 controller> pri m: udma100 s: - sec m: - s: - Prior message-id: d2e731a10909301617l1bad5dcbi7e5681e17fde1a04