Problem booting new build

[buckeyemma]

Hey guys, I just rebuilt my PC and I'm having issues with it booting up correctly.

First of all, I have 2 optical drives and 2 internal HDD's. Because of how the case is laid out, as well as the motherboard only having 1 IDE channel, I had to buy a PCI card with an extra 2 IDE channels.

Because of distance from the connections, I had to connect the HDD's to the PCI IDE controller (showing up as channel 4). The 2 optical drives are on the primary IDE channel connected to the motherboard.

So anyhow, when I turn the pc on it won't boot from the HDDs. It will search for devices, show that the primary channel is a DVD-RW drive, and then kick back to the black screen saying that the system configuration has changed since last boot and gives me the option of starting in safe mode or reverting back to the last successful configuration.

All I can figure is that having the HDDs on the PCI IDE controller at Channel 4 is creating problems. But with the case and motherboard configuration, that's the only way I could connect the drives. Is there a way to change what channel is booted from or am I missing a more obvious solution?

[doubledragon5]

Welcome to pcmech. Go into the mb bios and make sure you have the boot order listed correctly.. First CD rom, then you should be able to have the hd your next boot.. If they are on a pci ide it should not matter...

[buckeyemma]

Thanks for the welcome. Unfortunately, I already checked the boot order in bios and it didn't change anything. The 2 HDDs are connected to the PCI IDE controller and the opticals are on the mb IDE controller.

When it tries to boot (regardless of how I have the boot order specified in bios), it still only seems to recognize channel 1 - it doesn't even seem to acknowledge the hdd's. Bios recognizes them but I can't get them to work when it comes time to start up windows.