Couple Questions About Build

[acidfire]

Finally got all parts to build computer and ran into a couple problems. First after trial and error found out one stick of ram worked and other didn't :mad: After I solved that problem I ran into some problems.
#1 Can you use a hard drive connector for optic drives? The cable that came with the asus motherboard says hdd on the ribbon but I'm using sata drive and need a optical drive cable. Is the hard drive and optical drives use the same ribbon?
#2 This is the first time I have ever seen this :eek: After doing the first boot and solving my first boot problem with the ram I installed my floppy. hard drive, and connected the power to my optical drive. After making sure everything was connected right I turned the power on and a puff of smoke came from under the hard drive. I turned the computer off right away because I didn't want a fire. I then pulled the hard drive out of the computer and I could smell something burnt inside. To make sure nothing else happened to the computer I restarted with the hard drive disconnected and the computer load with no problems and all my drives worked. So my question is that a hard drive failure? Could I have a psu problem or it was just a faulty hard drive?
Now I have to return and get a new hard drive and ram :( Oh well, I learn something new every time I work on a computer :)

[Jamie Nixx]

Could be a faulty PSU, but more than likely it was a faulty HD, good thing you turned off the computer straight away, some people leave them on, no idea why.

The IDE cable that connects to an IDE HD can be used on IDE optical drives as well, the same with SATA optical drives and HD.

[acidfire]

Thanks for the reply. Have a couple more questions:
#1 Does the ribbon for the optical drives have to be connect to secondary ide or can it be connected to primary ide if I'm using sata hard drive?
#2 Say I have two sata hard drives and want one for windows and one for storage, since you don't set one drive as master and the other as slave how does the motherboard know which one is the master to load from? I know when I look at the motherboard manual it shows sata 1 -sata 4, so is sata 1 connector for the main drive and the rest are for extra hard drives and raid setup?

[Jamie Nixx]

SATA Harddrives configure themselves so you don't need to worry about master/slave ect, you just set the Bios to boot from HD 1 or 2, depending on which one has the operating system on, in fact i don't even think you have to do that, it should automatically boot from SATA 1

And the IDE ribbon can be connected to the primary IDE slot :)