cd rom configuration question

[koryo]

i have abit be62 and ata66 drive. my drive is connected to abit's high point ata controller on board (ide 3). it is jumper set to master and read by highpoint bios as master. since my cdrom is the only peripheral(besides floppy), can i connect it to ide 1 and set jumpers in back of my cd rom to master setting instead of slave. thus i think the cdrom will be read by bios as primary master. is there something inherently wrong with this setup? is it a mistake to have cdrom connected to ide1 or name it as primary master. will i have problems

[grunt]

I haven't tried that but only one way to find out - try it and see. I would also like to know if it works ok so post your results here! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[PsycholicSlag]

i think the real question is, why would you want to do that? i imagine you could, but i would also imagine you'd run into problems. as i've not tried this i'm only guessing, but i imagine it would be read as the bootable drive and expect to find an OS. unless there's some purpose in doing this, i wouldn't bother.

[NDC]

You will have no problems at all, you can hook up the CD-ROM as Master on the DMA33 IDE-1 port and hook up the hard drive on the HPT66 IDE-1 port, or vice-versa. Best thing to do is to put the UDMA66 hard drive on the HPT66 IDE-1, and the CD-ROM on the DMA33 IDE-1 as Master. Your CD-ROM is does not support DMA66 so putting that on the HPT66 port will be kinda of useless. Just make sure to set the field in the mainboard BIOS to boot from UDMA66, NOT IDE-1, so that your system won;t try to boot from your CD-ROM.

The HPT66 controller IDE channels are independent to the IDE DMA channels on the BE6 II M/B. If you hooked up a CD-ROM on the IDE DMA33 as master, it will only show as master in M/B BIOS. It will not show as master on the blue screen for the HPT66 BIOS. As you know already, you have 4 IDE channels on your M/B and can use 8 different IDE devices. There are two IDE controllers on your M/B, that is DMA33 and DMA66 and they both have their own BIOS.




[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 08-24-2000).]

[koryo]

thanks ndc! i know to some it might sound strange to do what i am doing but the cdrom is the only ata 33 device that i have. my thinking is that by making it the primary master hooked up to ide 1, i might get better performance than making it secondary slave on ide 2. but then i guess it doesnt matter. or does it?

in the abit bios of the "standard cmos utility" page, it doesnt show my cdrom listed as an identified drive. if fact it says none for all four sections. when i mean 4 sections they include primarymaster, primary slave, secondary master and secondary slave. all four shows none and i tried forcing it auto detect the device in each of the four sections but it still comes out as none. why is that? is that section only for hard drive identification?

ndc, one last question. am i better of just setting cdrom in the ide 2 port?

[NDC]

It makes no difference if you hook devices on IDE-1 or IDE-2, they are both the same BUS Speed. Because it is PRIMARY, it isn't faster than SECONDARY.

That is very strange that the devices are not showing in your M/B BIOS at boot up. Your BIOS did detect all the drives, right? And you are able to see the CDROM in Windows, right?

You NEVER hook up a slower device such as a CD-ROM, CDRW, Zip, etc on the same IDE channel as your hard drive. You hard drive is the fastest storage device on your computer, so if you put a slower device on the same channel as the hard drive, that will slow down the performance of your hard drive. The reason is that, IDE channel BUS moves at the speed of the SLOWER DEVICE.

You should NEVER hook up a DMA33 hard drive with a DMA66 hard drive either. BOTH hard drives will drop to DMA33 because one of the drive is a DMA33.

Ths best thing to do in yor case would be to:

(1) IDE-1= CDROM (Master) & CDRW (Slave, if you have one)

(2) IDE-2 = All other DMA33 hard drives.

(3) UDMA66 IDE-1 = UDMA66 hard drives (Boot drive)

(4) UDMA66 IDE-2 = All other UDMA66 Drives.

Hope this helps! Seeya! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 08-24-2000).]

[koryo]

thanks agian ndc! yeah the cdrom does not show up in the bios setup but it does show to be primary master during the boot up process before windows. and i can see it in windows. iguess nothing to worry about. thats for your layout. i does make sense the way you do it.

[NDC]

Great! Don't worry about it not showing up on your BIOS Setup. More importantly, CD-ROM is showing up on your boot-up screen and in your windows environment.

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 08-24-2000).]