CD boot from IDE adapter

[atti]

Hi everybody,

A while ago I installed a new hard drive into my computer on the same IDE channel with the old one. They didn't get along well so I decided to connect them separately, each of them on one of the IDE channels available on the MB. The CD drives that I had I connected through an old Promise ULTRA33 adapter card that was just lying around, keeping the faster IDE channels from the MB for the hard drives. It works fine, both in Windows and Linux, except the little annoying detail that I can't boot from a CD. I tried to use SmartBootManager but it doesn't work.
Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks everybody and I wish all a happy new year.

Atti

[Sterling_Aug]

Put the CD drive on the secondary IDE channel and set the BIOS boot order. It should work fine.

[Midknyte]

keeping the faster IDE channels from the MB for the hard drives

That thinking no longer applies. If anything, the hds would only slow down while accessing the optical drive.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confTiming-c.html

[atti]

Thanks for the reply.
I'll give it a try to see the performance impact.
Still some believe that mixing hard drives and optical drives is not recommended:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf.htm

[Midknyte]

older drives are being configured, when mixing hard disks and ATAPI devices like CD-ROMs, or when using advanced transfer protocols like bus mastering DMA.

That's the same site i quoted. Like I said, that was OLD architecture with bus mastering. Unless you are running a 486 or something, this no longer applies.

[atti]

Update:

I tried to connect the CD drive as slave to the secondary channel, with the second HD as master. Usually it works fine, no noticeable performance hit. But it happend that once the BIOS failed to detect the second HD and once the Windows detected the second HD as a "new" hardware with some phony name and size. I belive my MB has some issues so I better go back with the CD drive to the adapter.

If anyone is interested my system is:
MB: Lite-On TR 100 (intel815 chipset)
Pentium IIIS-1.26GHz
512MB RAM
Asus V7100 GeForce 2 MX / 64MB
2x Seagate Barracuda 80GB
CyberDrive CD-RW
WinXP and Mepis

[AllGamer]

does your mobo supports boot from USB ?

if it does, then you can use the adapter just fine

[Sterling_Aug]

I bet a BIOS update is in order if it isn't running the latest BIOS version.

A current BIOS may not support the new drive if it is too big. You listed it as a new drive.

[Train]

Promise ULTRA33 does have a size limitation. Hope that drive is not larger than 137 GB.