I just got this new motherboard, Gigabyte GA-M720-US3, but it only has 1 IDE slots on it... Before I use this I tried to connect either my ST380215A or my SONY DVD-RW DRU-190A using a IDE/SATA converter but the converter is not working. That IDE hard drive contains data for MS-DOS, NTLDR and XOSL to boot from the other drives. I already got 2 Seagate 160GB SATA, one for Windows and one for Linux, and it seems that if I plugged in the IDE/SATA converter the BIOS seems to have found it but is unable to recognize it since the POST takes a very long time during the SATA check. And now when I plugged my hard drive to IDE port and my DVD-RW to the ATA8212-133R, the DVD-RW seems to be recognized since its ITE IT8212 BIOS loaded and detected it in the IDE scan. However I was unable to boot from it or load it in DOS via an ATAPI driver... Since I just changed the board I'm not able to boot to other OS since some system devices has changed... Is there anything I can do to make the DVD-RW bootable using an external PCI IDE controller? Besides, for that I set my DVD-RW to Cable Select. EDIT: Actually that motherboard contains a FDD controller, and I'm not sure if there are ways to use that DVD-RW using a floppy boot. Also, I don't think I should plug my IDE card to the PCI controller since it's likely to make that hard disk a third drive, while that disk is supposed to be the first to boot. Besides, I don't know how to change a product name to something that is not in the list.

Sometimes optical drives don't work as well when connected to an ATA card. Connect your DVD-RW to the onboard port and the drive to the ATA card. Then check in cmos/bios setup and make sure the optical device is first in the boot order.

You're right. It worked. Fortunately I'm able to set it as a first hard drive since it's detected by BIOS as SCSI-0. And so far I haven't found any problems. By the way, I'm uncertain whether S.M.A.R.T. will still work on this card or not, since it's treated as SCSI in BIOS its S.M.A.R.T. capability is not shown in the boot screen.

I'm not sure either if the bios S.M.A.R.T capabilities extend to drives connected to an ATA card. Or the card may have it's own S.M.A.R.T option. I wouldn't worry though. You can always use a diagnostic from the drive manufacturer if you have any concerns.