Well, I just booted up and am having some problems. I plugged my HDD into my primary IDE channel and my DVD-ROM drive and CD-RW drive into the secondary channel. My HDD was detected successfully. However, it keeps saying that Sec Pri and Sec Slave (the two CD drives) are ATAPI incompatible. It then says "Press F1 to resume," but every time I hit F1 it just beeps at me. Any ideas?
Go into BIOS and under the first or second menu, you should have an option to Halt on certain errors. Try setting that to none and see if the thing goes away. I'd also check my IDE cable before doing that however. If it works fine in Windows in that configuration, I wouldn't worry about it.
The cable is okay, at least from what I can see. My current Asus board with Award BIOS has that halt option, but I don't think this AMI BIOS does. I'm pretty sure, but not positive, so I'll check it out. And yes, I would install Windows if I could. This leads me to the next problem. I think that my FDD may not be working either. You see, I wanted to try to set both CD drives to Not Installed, and then install the OS and go from there. But, I need to be able to boot from the XP CD, and if the drives are listed as Not Installed, they do not appear in the boot menu. So, I decided I'd put in my Win98 start up disk, get to an A:\ prompt, and then install from there. Well, when I put the disk in, and restarted, it still said No Boot Record found. I tried the disk in my other computer and it worked fine. The FDD light is on, but it's on all the time, non-stop, from the time I turn the computer on. Any idea what could be going on?
Sure ya got the red stripe lined up with pin 1 on all the devices? The floppy drive might be acting a little funky if ya got it put on wrong---as would the IDE devices.
Well, pin 1 was in the right place, but apparently I had the connectors backward. They're both gray, so I figured it didn't matter which when to the motherboard and which went to the FDD, but I switched them just to try it and it worked. So at least my FDD works. So then, I booted up with my start up disk and got to an A:\ prompt. However, since the CD drives were still "not installed," I still could not launch XP's setup, since D:\ and E:\ are technically not drives. So it looks like I must get around my CD drive problem before I can install Windows. I checked all cables, they're all in the right orientation and full inserted, as are all the power cables. The drives do indeed have power, but it keeps telling me atapi incompatible. Argh. Here's an interesting thing to note. I tried putting my CD drives on the primary channel and the HDD on seconday, just to try it. In this event the CD drives did NOT give me the atapi incompatible problem. I haven't tried going any further than this step (I put the HDD back to primary and the CD drives back to secondary), but if I did this again, I may be able to install the OS then, as the CD drives may be in the boot sequence list. Then again, even if I can, my HDD will be on the secondary channel, and I know that's not good. Should I try this anyway?
Yes. The 2nd IDE port may just not like both CD/DVD drives on it. If that's the case, then you're all set. If the port is bad, then you'll have some problems, which you'll need/want to know about.
Okay, I'm at school right now, but I'll try that when I get home. If that happens to work, is it okay to keep my HDD on the secondary channel? Will I be losing any significant speed?
Both IDE ports have the same speed, so you shouldn't see any difference. IF there is any difference (and I seriously doubt it), it's nothing more than a fraction of the total performance, and nothing you'll be able to tell w/o benchmarking, and a few points difference is in the margin of error.
w00t! Good news. I switched the cables on the ports, and it works fine. I'm typing this from my newly built computer. Every part from scratch, my first one ever. Thanks guys for ALL the help, especially you Big B. Now I have a LOT of installing and configuring to do.
Glad to hear it! :good: Finish installing drivers and programs before tweaking around. That way, you have the least chance of accidentally corrupting something (it's happened before to me when overdoing it on settings)
Haha, yeah, I can imagine. I'll get the crucial stuff done first. Oh, and btw, the Maxtor QuietDrives are NICE!! I barely hear any sound at all when my HDD's working.
One small thing: the first day I booted my new PC, the CPU temps (XP 2100+) started at around 26 C, which is excellent, and ended up getting to the upper forties. However, now, when I first boot it starts at 50 or so and then hovers around the mid-fifties to upper fifties. Is this too warm for an Athlon XP?
That's getting a little warm, but well within tolerance. You've got a retail heatsink, which are doing the job, but just enough. If you want better cooling, you'll have to get a better cooler.
Ah, that's really unfortunate to hear, especially considering I'd probably need to take out my motherboard to put on a better heatsink.
