Promise Ultra 66 BIOS not found

[allen.d.brenden]

I have an old Gateway Pentium 3 with Windows 98SE. I was backing up the hard drives to an external drive when the computer shut down. It happened when I was on another computer, so I don't know if there was any error messages. When I try to boot it now it it says "Ultra66 BIOS version 2.00 (build 18)" with "detecting" with a rotating symbol. Then it says "Ultra66 BIOS is not installed because there are no drives attached." Then "operating system not found. It is a Promise Ultra 66 controller.

 

[BFG-9000]

It means the boot disk in that system just died. With no bootable drives attached, it sees no point in loading its option ROM into memory to take up space there, and is telling you so.

If you don't have a more modern computer with onboard IDE to attempt data recovery from, you should know that Promise Ultra66 PDC20262 has no 64-bit drivers whatsoever, only up to XP-32 (the only Promise IDE card with Vista-64 drivers is the Ultra133 TX2 PDC20369). On the same computer, you could get another IDE drive and install 9x-XP on that, preferably using the onboard Ultra-33, then try to recover the data that way. Trying the suspect drive on both the onboard and Promise66 would tell you if it's actually the Promise66 that died.