Hi guys Just upgraded to a gigabyte 965p DS3 mobo with an Intel Core 2 duo E6300 processor but have issues around connecting up my IDE 80gb & 160gb hard drives & my DVD ROM & DVD Rewriter. The mobo only has one IDE slot so I can connect my 2 hard drives to that but what about the ROM drives ? can they only be connected via IDE ?? If so is my only alternative to get a PCI IDE connector card...if this is the case, how am I going to install drivers which accompany the the IDE card on CD, when the rom drive is out of action. Thanks for your help.

Install the main hard drive and the DVD, copy the contents of the install CD to the hard drive, then install the other HD and the controller card with the DVD. You should be able to install the software that was copied.

It is feasible to buy PCI IDE Cards with a Boot ROM, also could you not purchase IDE to SATA Convertors for the hard drives ? http://www.cooldrives.com/serial-at...

I suggest you buy a controller card and use it for one of the harddrives & the burner. That way you can still boot the CD and you will have separation of the drives. Be sure that any PCI card you get supports 48 bit LBA. There are dual format cards out there that support both IDE & SATA.

You can also buy an inexpensive Firewire/USB 2.0 caddy and couple the applicable non-system hard disk as an external drive.

You may have problems when connecting ATAPI devices (cdroms) to an ATA card. The cards I've used aren't entirely ATAPI compatible and resulted in problems with CD burners and DVDs. If you do get one of the cards make sure it's one that is compatible.

DAVINCAPS is correct. I forgot to mention that. Many controller cards only support harddrives, not optical drives. As far as the 48 bit LBA compliance goes they may state something like supports harddrives up to 137GB. That would mean they are NOT 48 bit LBA compliant.