dvd as master IDE

[rock72]

Rob I have the ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE mother board and the DVD showes as Primary IDE MASTER and the Slave showes nothing. The manual states to set Master to none if no drive installed. I have a SATS drive and when set to none the DVD does not show up anywhere. Any suggestions? I am using the latest parts on your list. I chose not to purchase a floppy drive or sound card.

[Lerxt]

Can you please provide some more info about your configuration? From what I gather you have the following drives:

1 IDE DVD Drive
1 SATA Hard Disc Drive

Here's what I would do:

1) Make sure your HDD is connected to the Primary SATA port and that power is running to the drive.
2) Make sure your DVD is properly connected on the IDE channel (along with proper power connection) and that there are no jumpers set (if it's the only drive then you shouldn't need to set it as the master). Make sure you're using the proper connector (if its the first drive, it should be the first connector on the IDE cable.
3) In your BIOS, set the disc drive type to AUTO for all of the drive ports - when you boot up, it should try to auto detect for drives on each port. It will say that it can't find a drive for those ports that are not connected. This will allow you to go back to the BIOS and disable those ports for faster boot up.

This should work for a simple two drive system, especially with one SATA and one IDE.

[rock72]

I have the following items, Antec Sonata III case, ASUS M2N32-SLE DELUXE, AMD Athlon 64x2 6400 Dual Core Black edition, WD SATA 500 gig, e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320mb, Crucial Ballistix PC2 8500 DDR2 4gig, Sony DRU840A 20x burner, Zoom/modem V.92 model 3025.

I have connected the SATA to the #1 of 6 ports. My case port cable is connected to #6. Not sure if you have a ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE or not but it has 6 SATA and 1 RAID connection.

Not sure what "DVD properly connected on the IDE channel" means. The DVD is connected to the black connector and the blue is connected to the MB, grey center connector is not used. There is a jumper on the master and I will remove. As far as the power connection I have two cables and one has an extra 4 or 6 pin connector I only assume for a floppy drive not sure. Which is the correct one to use, I just assume power is power?

I hope this answers your questions, I am new at this and not sure of a lot of the terminology.

Thank you.

[Lerxt]

Proper connection to the IDE channel means that you have the IDE connected properly to the drive - sometimes the connector can be upside down. Also, it needs to be first cable in the chain (as there are two IDE connectors on the same chain, the second being for the slave).

The power cables can only go one way for either drive that is, a 4 pin can only go in a 4 pin and can't be inserted incorrectly. IDE connectors sometimes be installed wrong. Make sure all the drives have power connections along with the data connections.

Did you check your BIOS settings? Make sure that you have "AUTO" selected in the Drives screen for the Primary SATA and the Primary IDE. It should auto detect them and you'll be off to the races.

[rock72]

I removed the jumper from the dvd and now it is shown as the Secondary Master. Still can not run the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics utility that rob suggest. I tried using a cd and zip drive and neither was identified when I hit F10 to reboot. It always comes back saying it is looking for a boot disk.
I will look at the cable to the dvd one more time, I know it is connected to the MB correctly but will check the dvd itself.

Any other suggestions?

[Lerxt]

Secondary Master sounds almost right to me - it looks like it's not on the right channel - if you have two IDE's one is primary with a master and a slave and the other is secondary with a master and slave.

If the DVD is showing up as Secondary Master then the DVD drive is being recognized. Try moving the cable to the other port on the MOBO and it should then become Primary Master.

Now, make sure the BIOS recognizes the SATA drive - make sure it's also set to Auto in the BIOS.

Finally, make sure that the boot sequence starts with the DVD drive first (it may be identified as Primary/Secondary IDE) - it should recognize it as a DVD/CD rom however.

Failing that, does your BIOS allow you to press a key to access the boot sequence? Mine allows you to press F2 (BIOS set-up) or F12 (boot sequence) and using F12 allows me to choose a boot device, regardless of what's been selected in the BIOS.