Notice to builders using Intel P965/G965 chipset motherboards!

[glc]

As you may or may not know, the 965 chipset no longer has native IDE support. Most manufacturers have put a 3rd party IDE controller chip on the board for backwards compatibility. All the ones I've seen have been made by JMicron. There seems to be a lot of issues cropping up with this. Because of this, I'm making the following recommendation for a 965 build:

Go 100% SATA. There is no sense in buying a new IDE hard drive anyway. There are now enough SATA optical drives on the market to make this very viable. If you must reuse any old IDE drives, be aware that you may have problems with them.

Now - what do I do with my old IDE hard drive that I wanted to reuse? Well, my suggestion is buy an external housing for it and use it as a backup device. Here is one I *highly* recommend:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817155601

It's aluminum, it has a cooling fan, and comes with an OEM version of Acronis True Image. You can create compressed images of all your partitions with it - and the image and housing CAN be used for a "bare metal" restore to a new hard drive if yours fails. I would MUCH rather deal with this than RAID 1. Just hook it up and boot with the CD. The software can also be used to clone one hard drive to another.

[webhead68]

I have the apricorn external housing coming in the mail today and I have 2 questions.

(1) What do you mean by "bare metal" restore.

(2) Can I avoid the hassle of uploading XP, drivers and software by cloning my current hard drive and using it on my new build (which I will be building this weekend)? Any problems doing this rather than a clean install of all?

Thanks for your time.

[glc]

1. Bare metal means a totally blank hard drive. You don't have to partition or format it. The image restore function does all this for you. There's 2 excellent PDF manuals that install when you install the software - Image EZ and Clone EZ User's Guides.

2. You can do that, but you will still have to do a repair reinstall of Windows and install drivers for all new hardware. See the Tips and Tricks forum.

[newbuilder14]

That must be why during bootup, I see a JMicron (I believe) screen recognizing my optical drive manufacturer and model.

I'm so glad my optical drive works.

[glc]

This thread is ONLY for discussions on the 965 chipset JMicron controller.

[newbuilder14]

GLC, just a question, but I was wondering how exactly you'd recommend an optical drive configuration for a P965 chipset. I see that you mentioned 100% SATA if possible, but in another thread you mentioned that it would be fine to go with one SATA optical and one IDE optical if the availability was an issue. Is the problem with controlling more than one IDE drive? That is probably it because I run an IDE DVD burner on my P5B.

[glc]

At least one SATA optical so you can be sure you will get the OS installed. I've heard of people that have had zero problems with IDE opticals and hard drives on it, and I've heard of people who have nothing but problems.

[PaulN]

I ran into a situation when bringing up my new Intel DG965WH motherboard
using 100% SATA interfacing drives.

My Samsung SATA interfacing CD/DVD drive worked perfectly but I couldn't
get Windows to load (more on this in a minute).

The Intel motherboard BIOS has an 'IDE emulate' mode where
(apparently) the motherboard can make SATA drives 'look' like IDE drives.

When I kept getting that irritating 'Error 0x0000007B' Stop message when
trying to load Windows XP I thought that perhaps making the SATA harddrive
(a Seagate) 'look' like an IDE drive when Windows started to load.

A problem .... when I configured BIOS to make SATA drives 'look' like IDE
.... it killed the SATA interface to the Samsung CD/DVD drive. There isn't
a way to keep the CD/DVD drive on a 'real' SATA connection while having
BIOS make the SATA hard drive look like an IDE drive.

The 'fix' ? ..... Realizing that my newly bought 3 1/2 inch floppy drive,
on which I needed to read some Intel SATA drivers, was broken.

The problem .... as near as I can figure .... is that Windows XP (on a new
disk that I bought a few months ago and put on a shelf) doesn't 'know'
what a SATA drive is without an additional driver.

Even thought the Intel motherboard/BIOS 'know' what a SATA interface
is .... apparently the problem is that when Windows XP started to boot
it suddenly didn't know what to do as it didn't know 'where' to look for
the hard drive (because the drive uses a SATA interface).

Once I got a new 3 1/2 floppy drive the problem 'went away' .... when
I hit 'F6' during the CD start-up sequence it really did something so that
when I later inserted the Windows XP CD it then it 'knew' about the
SATA hard drive.

Very educational .... I wish it'd been less painful.

- Paul

[cuzzzzzz]

Glc.. I finished building with an IntelDG965ry MB / chipset two weeks ago . Put in two Seagate 250MB SATA drives (was told that only SATA hard drves should be used). On the only IDE channel, put a Teac CDROM and a Sony DVDRW drive. Loaded WinXP. All drives work fine. Only problem was trying to put floppy drive in... recognized in CMOS and Wndow's Explorer, but won't read or write to a floppy. Finally attached a USB floppy drive. Works fine.

cuzzzzz

[Apopkasux]

Understanding the warning, still have a question as I want to use old optical and hd on my build and upgrade as need requires (ex. when old drive dies, will upgrade to a new SATA drive-for now use the old one).

The 965 boards I am seeing say they have one IDE Port that supports two devices. I presume that means only ONE IDE cable can be connected, but it can support say two optical drives hooked to that one IDE cable? (Not TWO IDE cables???)

Also, does anyone have any experience with an IDE PCI Controller Card used to add more IDE capacity to the mobo? For instance: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815124001

Thanks!

[Alaron]

Yes, they support one IDE cable with 2 devices on that cable.

Controller cards work fine, though I've never heard of Syba brand. Unless you already have a fleet of IDE hard drives, I'd buy SATA drives and hook them to the board directly.

If you have any further questions, please start a new thread in the appropriate forum. Thanks.