Sanity check - IDE plugin card - booting

I'm trying to breathe new life into an old P3 450 machine 440BX chipset.

Usual problems, unrecoverable 8G drive limit, only ATA66 and very
memory fussy. I've managed to upgrade to 256M ram and got an IT8212
PCI Raid card to expand the drive capacity.

I had expected to boot from a small old drive and keep the main capacity
on the IDE card; I have no interest in raid. Curiosity was peeked however
when it appeared that the IT8212 card has a bios (scsi?) and can allegedly
be a boot device so I now hope to bin the slow old drive & boot from the
plug-in card (without creating a proprietary raid system).

Plugging a bootable W98 drive into the raid card results in an 'Invalid
System Disk' message and plugging an XP system disk gives 'NTLDR is
missing' error - different messages. Both partitions are primary dos &
active. W98 drive has the IT8212 drivers installed.

Booting from the mobo ide gives full access to the raid card drive and
booting from a floppy allows fdisk & format /s of that drive. System can
then boot to dos from that drive, data can then be read from but not written
to that drive.

Before I move into deep searches on whether I will be able to create a non-
proprietary boot system with this setup, has anyone tried this, am I
flogging a dead hoss?

 

I had hoped for a bios upgrade to fix the 8G but it wasn't a very well
supported board so no luck.

Sadly no oemsetup.txt but this is a fairly common chip (8212) so I'll see if I
can find something as this looks like a good option. Hopefully the drive
would still be bootable on a conventional mobo controller as I want to avoid
a system that is proprietary to just this plugin card.

Thanks for the sanity check, I'll drop the W98 & concentrate on XP, much
nicer than having an extra drive in the box just to boot.