I Had A Advent 3209 But I Upgraded It It Has A ECS L4S5M Motherboard The Problem Is It Had A 40Gb HDD In Which I No Longer Have I Upgraded It To A 80Gb And Added A CD-RW So Now Their Is My HDD And ZIP On Secondary IDE And DVD-ROM AND CD-RW ON Master the problem is that the master ide doesn't work properly any more the name of the drive is garbled in the bios i have tried putting the hdd and zip on the master with the same result however when i then auto-detect the hdd it shows garbled but as 20gb all the cables are new there are no bent pins and i have just upgraded the bios and reset the cmos please help i manage to get windows xp on with just the dvd-rom and hdd on the secondary ide please help thanks in advanced I Got A Athlon 2200+ 512MB PC133 SDRAM 80Gb Hard Drive 64MB Geforce 3 TI500 Syntax SV266A 2MBPS Broadband Windows XP MCE 2005

How about getting a PCI IDE adapter card for the DVD and CD drives?

Pairing up 2 optical drives on the same cable/channel sometimes causes weird things to happen. I think I told you this in your other post...don't know if you tried it, but take out or disconnect 2 of the IDE devices. All you need is the HDD as primary master & one of the optical drives as the 2ndary master...hopefully this will autodetect correctly & allow you to install Windows. Temporarily unplug the ZIP drive & the other optical drive...you don't need them to install XP & one of them might be flakey. When you do attempt to connect all 4, I suggest this config: prim master = HDD prim slave = DVD 2ndary master = CD burner 2ndary slave = ZIP Make sure your master/slave jumper settings are correct (some HDDs have a different setting for master/single or master w/slave) & NEVER use cable select. ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

Jam: Not trying to argue, I just find this an interesting topic, and I see it come up so often. I know you always suggest, as you have here, to pair the optical drive with a hard drive. This may in fact be quite valid, although I have not seen a post where someone says, yes that cured the problem. But as so many don't give the courtesy of posting back, who knows. Or I simply missed it. However, I've always felt that if this is indeed the best setup, the mfrs. would certainly know and recommend it, and I've yet to see one who does. Yesterday I picked up a Mad Dog cdrom at CompUSA, since it comes out free after rebate. (Putting it in an old HP to yardsale) So this is fresh on my mind. The install instructions state, and I quote verbatim: NOTE: we strongly suggest you do not (underlined) set up your Lightening CD-ROM drive on the same IDE channel as your hard drive. All my machines past and present, admittedly this is not a huge number, have been set up opposite to your recommendation and function perfectly. I recall a post of yours indicating that your setup yields on the fly recording times twice as fast as my setup would. I've Googled for an answer and checked various mfr. sites, no luck. Is there an authorative source (no offense to you intended) for this setup that you could recommend to me? I'd really like to understand and change my set-up if there is in fact a great advantage in it, as you stated before. Again, I'm not trying to argue or be discourteous to you in any way. Thanks.

Pardon the interuption, but I'd like to put in my two cents. The reason for Jams suggested setup is to increase move/copy speed between drives. If the two drives are on different channels the speed is significantly increased. "NOTE: we strongly suggest you do not (underlined) set up your Lightening CD-ROM drive on the same IDE channel as your hard drive" That's to increase the speed between them. However if you also have a CD writer, you probably want to compromise and put the cdrom drive on the same channel as a hard drive and put the burner on the other channel. You will probably be transferring data between the hard drive and the writer more often than between the cdrom and hard drive.

The problem with the 80-wire cables is they're generally not long enough to reach from the HD to the cdrom. So if you have more than one cdrom device you either put them both on the secondary or add an ATA card. Whenever possible I slave the cdrom to the HD and put the burner or DVD by itself on the secondary. It sounds like there's a hardware problem with the secondary controller that's not likely repairable. You say you now have the HD on secondary and the cdroms on primary. Other than their IDs being garbled on the posting screen do the cdroms work OK? Since cdrom don't need to be specifically ID'd by the bios they may work OK there. If they do you can either leave them that way or buy an ATA card. If they don't work it sounds like you have no choice but to add the card.

That last paragraph left a lot to be desired. The bottom line is put the drives that you transfer data between more often on different channels.