Can you put a HD and DVD/RW on the same IDE channel?

Hi

Building (badly!) a pc for a mate, all new components except his old 160gig HD. I've noticed the mobo (Asus M2N-E) only has one IDE ribbon slot.

Can I put the old HD and the DVD/RW on the same IDE ribbon connector or will it run like crap/explode?

Should I tell my mate he needs to buy a SATA HD and thus keep the IDE free for the DVD only?

cheers :)

On another note, how the hell do you know where all the wires go? Theres about a million of 'em just for the on/off switch coming from the front of the case.

You can and it will work fine, you just need to set the slave/master jumpers on the back of the drives to the correct position.

The front panel connectors should all be labeled, and the motherboards manual should have a diagram.

Just gonna echo everything Random just said... with a simple "yep".

cheers fellas.

so you'd have the HD as master and the DVD/RW as slave?

Yep.

look at the motherboard instruction booklet. If you follow it step by step then everything should be fine. There might also be a large sticker diagram that you can put on the inside of the cabinet, where all the slots are labeled.

Not sure about the IDE ribbon though, but if you check the diagram, it might say.

Edit: thats what happens when you quick reply to a page you loaded a few hours ago :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SpockBert

cheers fellas.

so you'd have the HD as master and the DVD/RW as slave?

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They should work as 'cable select' as well, but specifying master and slave as you listed above will be more surefire. When you connect them and eventually boot, you'll be able to see if it's set up properly right when the bios posts.

Nah the mobo instruction booklet is at best useless..

Page 1. put the processor in..ok easy enough
2. plug in the CPU fan in...hey this pc building lark is a doddle
3. put your memory in...

ok...er..two sticks...and A1,A2 and B1,B2..single or dual memory?...er...I was putting in a dual core processor so went for dual setup A1 and B1 (or the two yellow ports, scientific eh?!)

4. put the floppy in...er which bit goes from the power supply to the floppy..oh dear

5. put the HD in....set to master...theres 4 flavours of "master"! 15 head master, 16 head master...ah crap

6 power on for the first time...HANG ON THERES ABOUT 4576 wires still not plugged in anywhere!

pages 7 - 599 all the diagnostic crap that'll i'll never use once this sucker is up and running

Guess I'm not really a hardware guy, should have kept my mouth shut and told him to buy a Dell!

usually the power button leads will have PW or Power written on the connector,
same with the pins on the motherboard they usually have something written on the board to give you an idea of what goes where.

Otherwise, if you can post some pics of this area of the board, and of the ends of the wires, maybe i can come up with a simple diagram for you.

I've yet to see a clear pinout for a case panel. Almost always they'll show two pins for power and two for reset while my mobo will either have 5 pins or my reset plug will have too many holes. I gave up on trying to figure out my front panel mic and speaker ports.

Er help! got everything plugged in except one or two tiny spindly little wires with audio stuff written on them so figured they weren't crucial.

Just went to power it up for the first time and after about 2 secs its switched itself off...

what do you reckon the possible causes are...

a) power socket is wrong, I had to clip together 2 power leads from the power supply to match the number of pins on the mobo, one of them was a 4 pin socket......bad move? There is a space for a 12v 4 pin connection, maybe i should have put it there instead?

b) jumper settings are wrong

c) any other number of things and I've just fried this mobo!

HELP!

its ok fixed it, seems i did need that missing 12v connection.

its working but what a noisy bugger, he's not gonna like that ;)

What is making the noise?

Its the power fan that came with the psu/case, suppose i can get him a quieter one, it said in the ebuyer reviews its a bit noisy, guess they weren't kidding. Maybe it'll be better once i stick the Asus mobo drivers on, maybe slow down the fan?

I'm using his old 160gig HD which he had split into a 130 and 30 gig partitions, when installing the OS i tried to delete the smaller partition and installed OS on the bigger one. Its installed fine but his HD only shows up as 130 gig, anyway to get that other 30 gig back?

Thinking about getting some floppy based app to write a load of 0's to the HD and restore it to factory settings and get rid of the partitions, think Maxtor used to provide one of those apps although this HD is Hitachi.

Reckon thats a good way to go?

When you installed windows you should have deleted both partitions then made one new partition with all of the free space.
If you want to repartition with out reinstalling windows, I would use partition magic.

But the problem may be the jumpers on the drive,
i think with some drives if you set the jumpers wrong it limits the usable size of the drive.

Did you see the 130gig partition and the 30gig partition listed when you installed windows?

yeah there are 2 options...... cable select or jumper config. They will both work fine mate, but make sure the HD is obviously configured as master and dvd-rw as slave :

99% done on this now, everything works except the goddam floppy drive.

I've got 2 floppy drives and 2 cables and think I've tried every possible combination to get just one working. The power's on but when I put a floppy in it says "please insert floppy".

It seems to work better when outside the case and not fixed inside the case, although it always says the disk isn't formatted so I format the disk, try copy a jpg onto it and it seems fine. So I then leave all the wires the same, screw it into the case, fire the machine up, try and view the jpg I've just saved onto it and...

"please insert disk"

or

"the floppy has created an error that the floppy management system cannot recognize" or something like that.

Sometimes it says it a previous bootup didn't work properly and would I like to press F1 or enter Setup.

I've spent hours on this and kind of out of ideas now, is it the mobo, the FDD cables (tried 2), the floppy drive itself (tried 2), the disks, (tried several).

Another annoyance is the eject pin on the case won't reach the small plate on either drive so I had to jam in a bit of folded metal to make the eject plate on the drive stick out a bit.

Any ideas?! The rest of it, HD, DVD burner, sound all works perfectly.

lol, why are u still using floppy's mate?

I think from what u have described there, it sounds like it could be an intermitent problem with the floppy controller on the board. I know when i was building pc's there was always troubles with the floppy.

From my experience when windows comes up and says the disk isnt formatted properly - it usually means the floppy is damaged in some way, but in saying that it seems like u have gone through a hefty process of elimination.

My suggestion would be scrap the floppy mate.

I agree.
I haven't put a floppy drive in a machine in probably at least 2 years.
The drive or the disks may be defective also.

I wonder if I ought to scrap the mobo and sent it back, got 3 problems...

1. floppy doesn't work, 2 drives, 2 cables and numerous disks all working fine in other machines wont work in this one.

2. front panel - usb works fine but mic jack doesn't work and headphone jack as bad intermittant problem, you have to juggle about with it and pull any headphones plugged in out slightly to get any sound.

3. ultra sensitive rear panel, sometimes unplugging the speaker jack or even twitching it will cause the pc to switch off, no error, no BSOD just instant killed power.

Reduced 3 by making sure green speaker connector on woofer supplying pc was pushed right in, but still bumping the pc slighly can cause it to switch off.

Not the worst problems in the world, pc works great as long you don't mind no headphones on the front, no floppy and you don't bump the case and stay away from the back!

What do you reckon, would you send the mobo back? I'm outside ebuyers 28 day policy (just).