🚀 go-pugleaf

I volunteered to get this thing going and I can use some help with " the big
picture" on these Promise disk controller boards.  ( I reread this and know
I ramble on here, but put it all here in case any specific details matter
When I say 'the IDE drive" I mean the disk using the onboard IDE channel)

I'd like a boot menu to appear:
Win98 from onboard IDE primary channel - master - primary partition
Win2000  this same drive - second partition
XP from a mirror set on a Promise TX2 card.

The PC  has 2 XP drives mirrored - works fine. But now  the PC needs to
multiboot with Win98/2000. I have Win98/2000 on a second disk and it boots
fine standalone also. So I could make either of these the 'boot drive' with
a proper boot.ini file on either. I enabled debugging at bootime on XP and I
can see it boots from (0),(0),(0),(2) (Partition #1 has diags on it.) while
on the Promise card. I'd like to leave these 2 drives alone. So that's it
for the Promise card - my other boot disk will be on the motherboard primary
IDE channel.
.
Here's where I'm stuck: - with the (x),(y),(z),(w)\dir      designation and
which drive contains the boot.ini file.
Also for the Promise card , should the boot string read  MULTI x,y,z,w  or
SCSI x,y,z,w

If it matters:
From the top, in the Dell Bios I have to choose the boot adapter (IDE or
Promise)
If I use the Promise controller ,  then IT sees its path as  0,0,0,2 - boots
fine
I then add the 98/2000 drive to the motherboard and .... then I have to
change the BIOS setup ?
Either way , what should that boot path be ?? I thought 1,0,0,2 (since
windows would consider wherever it just booted from to be (0) - the PRomise
card ), but I read at MS support:
"X is the ordinal number of the adapter and should always be 0 if IDE."
OK so then I tried the onboard IDE as controller 0 - BUT in the BIOS it
looks for the Promise card first !
If I change the boot order of the cards, it just fails when I try XP and
2000.  Is this a problem due to the Dell BIOS setup , or should it work
either way ? I can make the IDE drive drive C and change the bios boot to
onboard and it boots fine. But trying either 2000 or XP no worky. 2000 gives
me a "can't find ntoskernel" and XP reports " Win2000 error..." (Since it
says Win2000 , I'm assuming it's NOT going to the Promise card at all.) Lots
of permutations like this that I've tried.

The users of the PC are not computer wizards (like me !!) . They just need
to boot diff OS'es to support diff apps for 6 months, so I need this boot
menu selection to work. I'll rename the onscreen strings to show as their
apps. Someone out there must have been here before ( I hope) A little help
on the Dell BIOS selection (if I choose onboard and then via the menu select
Promise drive to boot ... ) and the IDE setup .

On MY clone (ASUS)pc I have a ABIT / Hotrod disk controller, it seems
"smarter" to figure out that there are drives on the motherboard as well as
its own card.  On my Hotrod card it uses MULTI x,y,z,w syntax even though
when booted the controller appears as scsi.