Recently I bought a new IDE HDD. I used to primarily use a SATA drive but now have my OS and programs on the new HDD and keep my SATA drive for storage (movies, music etc). On my motherboard, I have 3 IDE inputs. For some strange reason, I can only run the HDD and my DVD drive on the primary IDE socket. If I put either device on input 2 or 3, I cannot use them. I have made note of jumpers on each drive. Then again, I took apart my old PC for reference and even with the drives in seperate IDE inputs, along with the jumper setting exactly the same as that (and working!), I cant achieve the same results on my newer PC. What could I be missing here? I have checked BIOS settings and nothing I have tried so far has made any difference. Any help will be appreciated, cheers!
Due to the 9xx series chipsets always being paired with Intel's ICH7/7R, you're going to see 4 SATA ports and a single IDE port. Additional IDE ports may be added, but the motherboard company will need to slap in a 3rd party IDE controller. Now, you may have to enable this. Where, I don't know for sure, but you'll need to look in your manual. My guess would be that it's under "Integrated Peripherials" if your motherboard uses the AwardBIOS program, but, again, check the manual.
Sorted out the whole IDE thing I did have to mess around in BIOS for a bit, but eventually found out that I had to activate SATA RAID to be able to use the other IDE ports. Thanks for the help on the last post, however I've got a new problem now. I can run the HDD and DVD drive off seperate IDE's now, so no problems there. When I connect my SATA drive inside my computer and boot up Windows, Windows detects new hardware (a RAID controller). I then put in my Gigabyte driver CD hoping it would detect an appropriate driver on there, but with no luck. Would I need to go through the whole F6 thing at window startup to install it or could I simply do it through Windows? Just out of curiosity (as I didnt have my computer set to RAID mode before I got an ATA drive, but set as disabled), what is RAID? Could somebody give a very brief explanation please as having read about it in the manual and elsewhere, I dont fully understand it. Thanks!
RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive (not Independent) Disks. It's a general method of having hard drives appear as one drive for performance and/or redundancy. Most level's of RAID involve some form of redundancy, the sole exception being RAID 0, also referred to as striping. RAID 0 combines (number of drives in array) x (smallest sized drive) = (useable space). RAID requires at least 2 disks, and I believe anything above levels 0 or 1 require at least 3.
Nevermind, all sorted now. Downloaded some driver off the Gigabyte website and it works no problem now. Once again, thanks for all the advice guys!
