Using SATA & IDE at the same time

[heymrdj]

System specs:

Soyo I865PE Dragon Plus 2 (not the v1.0) motherboard
TDK 440N 4x DVD burner (IDE Secondary Master)
Lite-On 48x CD reader (IDE Secondary Slave)
WD 160GB HDD (IDE Primary Master)
WD 8GB HDD (IDE Primary Slave)
Seagate 320GB SATA HDD (SATA 1 port)

WHat I'm trying to do is to get the SATA hard drive to be the boot drive (holding WinXP and my main programs). The 160GB will be used to hold excess info and current DVD projects and torrents. The 8GB is page filing and 1 .iso temp storage .

My board has the following options available:

IDE Only
SATA Only
Pri. IDE + Sec. SATA (SATA port 2)
Pri. SATA (SATA port 1) + Sec. IDE
IDE + SATA

The only one that lets me use all the drives is the final one, IDE + SATA. However when I use this, it only want to scan the IDE drives for an OS. If neither IDE HDD has any OS or partition, it gives me the error saying to put in a bootable disc and press enter. So the only way I can get it to use the SATA is to use a bootloader (currently trying OSL2000). But when I use it I can only see the SATA in My COmputer, it won't let me see the rest of them.

If I don't partition the IDE drives, then it will go on to the SATA and boot. If I partition the IDE drives, then it no longer seems to want to go to the SATA drive to look for a boot.

So any idea on what to do guys? I'm getting frazzled out.

[glc]

Please correct your terminology, you are confusing me.

On IDE you have *Primary* and *Secondary* channels. There can be a *Master* and a *Slave* device on each one of these. There's no such thing as a "master master" etc.

[heymrdj]

Yes I do mean Primary and Secondary channels.


Here's what I did last night/this morning.

I installed windows XP to the SATA drive
I plugged the 8GB drive to Primary Master and the two CD drives were left at the same Secondary slots as before.

When I boot up I get

SYSTEM BOOT FAILURE. PLEAST INSERT BOOT DISK AND RESTART

So that shows whenever there is a IDE HARD DRIVE on the system, it won't look past it. If I remove that HD, then it will boot the SATA like its supposed to.

[glc]

Use an 80 wire cable, blue end to the motherboard, black end to the desired master, gray in the middle to the desired slave, jumper the drives to CS (cable select). If the opticals are also on 80 wire, jumper them CS. If the opticals are on a 40 wire, use master/slave.

Try putting the opticals on primary and the hard drives on secondary. You can also try one of each, make the opticals masters and the hard drives slaves. Mix and match, just use 80 wire and CS to make the job easier.

[heymrdj]

Thx guys, I got it all set up now. Must be something I selected wrong...I really don't know... But thx again