Amiga 2000 with SCSI and IDE

[Matt_H]

I'm guessing there's a termination issue. But if you can't resolve that, disabling autoboot seems to be the way to go. The thing you were missing is that you need a software version of the ROM in SYS:Expansion. Without that, the card is essentially disabled when autoboot is off.

V6.x of the soft-ROM is on the 2091 install disk available from various sources. Someone here (SpeedGeek, maybe?) recently put together a v7.0 soft-ROM, which Commodore never did. Search the forums and you should find it.

[Matt_H]

I believe the Soft ROM is just a software extension the speed up the card especially when the card is modified  with the 14 MHz jumper.

No, that's something separate. All hardware needs a corresponding software driver. Most disk controllers have this in ROM onboard. Other devices use disk-based drivers (in SYS:Expansion, Devs: or Libs: for instance). With the onboard ROM disabled, the 2091 needs a disk-based driver.

I think, though, that there is an optimized version of the soft ROM for boards that have the 14MHz mod. There may be a related software patch as well for cases where the onboard ROM isn't disabled. Maybe you're thinking of one of those.

[Matt_H]

The SYS:Expansion drivers were for KS 1.3 systems.  

Sys:Expansion was a more common home for drivers in the 1.3 era but it can be used in any version of the OS. See: The original X-Surf's IDE ports driver.

I had an A2000 with V7.0 ROMs in an A2091 and a CDROM plus SCSI CF card reader and 1 GB  HDD all working fine.

My guess is that the SCSI CDROM is telling the A2091 controller that it is a bootable device because it was designed for a system where it was one.

Yeah, a Finicky CD drive is certainly a possibility.

ROMs contain Firmware not Software. :-)

Close enough to be the same thing for my example. Whether it's disk-based or in ROM, it's program code to tell the system how to interact with the hardware.