hello, you must think I'm crazy but I just got a DVD burner and the PC already has a DVD player and a CD burner inside. At the moment I have the DVD burner in instead of the CD burner but is it ok to put the DVD burner on primary ide with the disk drive and have the other CD-Roms on the secondary ide? I got a message saying 80 channel primary id not found thing when I did this, but this was not making me comfortable and so now I have disabled one drive. What do you think? I should really be satisfied with two hehe but if it's inside the PC, why not use it? Thanks

Make sure you have the correct jumper settings on your cd/dvd rom drives and your hdd. This should work, I would use the DVD burner as a primary as well as your hard drive.

It will work. However, you may end up slowing your hard drive. On some motherboards the speed at which the ide devices operate is the slower of the two devices connected to the same port. Thus DVD-ROMS/CDROM/etc which are inherently slower than hard drives can affect the system performance. More modern motherboards (I believe) do not have these limitations. That is to say that each IDE device will operate to its maximum speed or the IDE ports' maximum speed which ever is the slower. To explain the last bit, for example if you put an ATA133 hard disk on in an ATA100 port then it will run only at ATA100. So check if your motherboards IDE port will allow you to put slower and faster devices without affecting each other. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Thanks for your quick replies. Ok, I will take a look at the instructions (manual) as you have in your sig. Any ideas about that message about no primary ID channel 80?

phatindy is on the right track as far as the no primary ID channel 80 error is concerned. It appears that your hard drive is not being detected because the two devices are most likely jumpered as master and thus confusing it. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Thanks mate! I got it working. I took the cable from the IDE 2 and put it on IDE 1 and then used a cable that I had on IDE 1. No message, and seems to work... it's strange though, because 1 cable gave me the 80 pin message, even if only 1 device was connected, the HD. Maybe it was a CD-ROM only cable and the other cable made my PC stop at CHECKING NVRAM, but works now IDE 2. Any ideas about all this?

Joe you can do this, I am on just such a computer. The HDrive needs to be connected to primary IDE controller as Master. Mixing lower drives in with faster will NOT slow down the harddrive. The configuration for the remaining optical drives is dependant on how you use them. For best transfer speeds you should have drives being used at the same time on different Channels.