IDE channels malfunctioning?

[Alex Taylor]

That's the first thing I did when I booted it up, I went into the BIOS. It was very sporadic; sometimes it would detect two devices, sometimes just one, sometimes it would list the Secondary Slave as something like $t$dk _ 34. It didn't matter which device was hooked up where as well, I tried a few different combinations. Anyway, I'll trash this motherboard as soon as I get the claim. One of my clients builds computers so I can get some hardware at cost :D

[Rob Lohman]

That is good news, Alex. Good luck with your new system. As
stated above the Promise controllers aren't that expensive
(they also have RAID controllers which are more expensive but
still not that much).

I have no personal experience with any of the other brands.

[Garret Ambrosio]

Alex, the HS student one, sorry bud, but you got that completely wrong. The secondary IDE channel is just that, a Secondary channel that has full bus and bus mastering to the subsystems of the mainboard. The slave/master config maybe what you have confused. Hard Disk Drives should always be masters, if possible and masters if the other component on the channel is not a hard drive.

Masters are exactly as it implies, it is the master of the channel if a HDD is following a CD, you will get problems in POST or while transferring data. The secondary channel IS the best place for your CD ROM. But if you have mor ethan one HDD and more than one CD-ROM, ideally to allow and optimize copying CD's on the fly, (Try Ahead Nero on the fly copying with two CD-ROM drives in the same channel and you will get a message) the two CDROM/CD-R should be in separate channels. So ideally with 2 HDD's and 2CD drives this would be the optimal physical configuration:

Primary Master: HDD
Primary Slave: CD-ROM
Secondary Master: HDD
Secondary Slave: CD-ROM

Alex is right about the fact that boot drives do not necessarily be in the primary master channel, but it should be. This makes it easier for the BIOS to find the OS.

[Alex Taylor]

In the new computer I'll be building once I get the claim, I'm going to get an ATA controller as Chris mentioned, so I can have a grand total of 8 devices :)

Now, I'll have 4 hard drives: 2 7200rpm 40gigs, one 7200rpm 80gig and a 5400rpm 13 gigger which I use for my OS right now.

I figure I'll put one of the 40gigs as the Primary master since that's got the new OS on it right now, and put the 13 as the slave. I'll just use those two drives for programs, web design stuff and miscellaneous storage.

On Secondary I'll put the 80 gig as the master and the 40 as the slave. I'll be using the 80 for video obviously, probably the 40 for music production stuff and a bit of video. Then, on the ATA controller I'll stick my optical drives. Does this sound like a good setup?

Oh and by the way, here are some pics of the computer for your enjoyment:
The case
The guts (note the detached processor fan!)

[Garret Ambrosio]

Alex that sounds like a good plan, but keep in mind on the ATA controller, where your optical drives will be, they should not have a slave master relationship, but actually on the two separate channels.

If you place your OS bootable drive in the Primary slave position you will not have C:\ designation to the OS partition (unless you specify this in W2K or XP it is easy WIN98, forget it.) making it non-standard and you will remember to always specify drive as letter d:\ for your OS. May help you to "ghost" the OS unto the 40GB and use some of it for program directories. Use the 13Gb for programs and images (porn, yay!) and stuff, DOCs, etc. and the remaining 80 and 40 as Video or whatever.

The cPU has way too much goop on it from the picture when you build the new one take a small BB sized drop of paste (silver if possible) and spread it using the edge of a business card over the CPU. Careful not to get crap outside the die. Silver is highly conductive of both heat and electricity and will short the tiny bridges out. The paste layer should almost be transparent or you will not get optimal heat transfer to the HSF. It would actually serve as the opposite and insulate the heat. If you need to remove goop use a high concentrate of rubbing alcohol (99%) and wipe off the excess goop being careful not to saturate the CPU with Alchohol.

[Alex Taylor]

Thanks Garret, I'll keep that in mind!

And the 40 gig that I will have as the Primary master DOES have my OS on it. The 13 gig is what i'm running off of right now, but I'm going to format that and use it for documents once I put together my new computer.