Hello, I currently have a Asus P5LD2 mainboard, 2- wd sata drives, 2 gb dual channel ram, antec case with antec neo 650wtt psu, a pioneer dvdburner.I cant seem to figure out why my 2 wd drives are detected as third ide master, and third ide slave in the bios setup utility in the main menu. I have 1 sata drive connected to the sata1 connector, and I have the second sata drive connected to the sata3 connector.I dont want to run this as a raid setup. I have looked at the manual and have tried there suggestions,but im still have problems setting everything up properly.Can someone help me? thank you

Is sata configured to run in IDE mode in the bios ?

Some bioses list all the hard and optical drives as being on IDE "channels", whether the SATA ones are in IDE compatible mode or not. Usually you can set SATA drive detection/controllers to any of up to 3 modes in the bios Setup - IDE compatible mode or similar - SATA mode (or AHCI) mode or similar - and if the controller chipset has the capabilty, RAID mode (or AHCI RAID mode, or SATA RAID mode) or similar IDE compatible mode has the advantage you don't need to install drivers for the SATA controllers on the mboard when you run XP's Setup - Setup will see the SATA drives fine, and you can install the SATA or RAID drivers later if you want to, and then set the bios Setup to SATA or RAID mode. If your only (or all your) optical - DVD or CD - drive(s) is(are) SATA connected, that is a situation I'm not too sure about. In that case the only way I know for sure you will be able to run Setup from a CD (or DVD) if you have no IDE optical drives connected is for you to have the bios Setup in IDE compatible mode. There is absolutely no advantage to an optical drive being SATA connected other than convenience - recent mboards often have only one IDE header and far more SATA headers - the optical drive runs up to exactly the same max data transfer burst speed, currently limited to UDMA 66 (UDMA 4 mode in Windows), whether the drive is IDE or SATA connected. Optical drives are limited by the speed at which a disk in them can be spun. However, IDE compatible mode is limited to a max data transfer burst speed of 133 mb/sec; SATA drives can attain a max data transfer burst speed of 150 mb/sec (SATA drives) or 300 mb/sec (SATA-2 drives, which all recent ones are). The max data transfer burst speed rating is hype - your drives do not run that fast all the time - they can only attain those speeds for very short periods of time - most of the time your hard drives run at a much slower sustained data rate, of, e.g. 50 mb/sec. If you have the mode set in the bios Setup set to SATA or RAID modes, you must install drivers for the SATA controllers on the mboard when you run XP's Setup by pressing F6 very early in the loading files from the Windows CD, and provide a floppy disk with the proper SATA or RAID controller drivers on it in a floppy drive connected to the mboard. XP's Setup cannot see the SATA drives otherwise. Setup will only recognize drivers on a floppy in a floppy drive at that early point in Setup - it cannot find drivers on a CD or DVD drive, or on a USB connected drive, or on a hard drive, and it can only recognize a very small number of USB connected floppy drive models, most of which have not been made for years. Almost all recent mboards still have a header for a floppy drive, even if your case does not have a space (bay) for one. "I dont want to run this as a raid setup." If your SATA controllers have RAID capability, it usually will not work to load non-RAID SATA drivers - you usually must load the RAID drivers. The RAID drivers include support for non-RAID use, and you do not have to set up a RAID array unless you want to. Even if you need to load the RAID drivers, you can still select either SATA or RAID modes in the bios Setup, if you want the max data transfer burst rate to be faster. ... The first two IDE "channels" in the bios Setup are always for up to 4 IDE drives if there are two IDE headers on the mboard, or if you have only 1 IDE header on the mbosrd, the first one is for up to two IDE drives - your first SATA drive in this case is on SATA1 and is seen as being on IDE "channel" 3. Since SATA drives have no master/slave/cable select jumpering, whether the mboard and bios sees a SATA drive as master or slave depends on which SATA header you connect them to - if it's seen as slave you probably can't boot from a drive connected to it. Some mboards have all master SATA headers, some have both master and slave SATA headers. Sometimes the SATA headers are different colors depending on whether they are designated master or slave; sometimes they are all the same color and you have to look in the manual in order to find out which is master, which is slave.