I'm new to this forum. I hope someone can steer me in the right direction. I have a Gateway I bought in '99. I have just installed a second internal (slave) HDD. My System Information indicates that the Primary IDE Controller has been "disabled in the hardware". My current bootable HDD is installed on a Promise Tech. Ultra 66 SCSI controller card. The secondary controller has my CD-Player and internal ZIP drive. There are no jumpers on the motherboard to re-enable the primary controller. CMOS IDE configuration is set to "AUTO" How can I re-enable the controller?. I wrote to Gateway Tech. support, they replied with a link to a tutorial on how to install a HDD. I already did that!

Have another look in the bios. in my bios I can you set the ide configuration to auto (mine is used to determine what drive is installed), and there is also a setting called on chip primary and secondary ide channel. this is used to turn off or on primary or secondary ide cables.

If you have no drives plugged into the motherboard then they will disable Primary (&/or Secondary) IDE Controller...the card has it's own IDE Controller (driver) so it don't need the default. Are you having any problems or just noticed this & wanted to turn it on?

My system works fine. It just doesn't recognize the primary controller Nor the new HDD attached to it. Under device manager the primary controller simply does not show up. As far as the CMOS configuration, from what I am seeing both primary master and primary slave is set to "AUTO". I'm starting to wonder if the motherboard originally had a bad controller and instead of replacing the mother board Gateway simply installed the controller card. I'm interested in the "chip" idea. How do I investigate this further? Thanks for the input.