On Monday 15 October 2007 15:47, Dotan Cohen wrote: > There's a good chance that my next motherboard won't have enough IDE > ports, and I've got too much IDE hardware to junk it and buy SATA. How > well do PCI cards that add IDE ports work? Any known gotchas? Does the > OS see them as different from the M/B's IDE ports? Specifically, I > need to run two DVD burners and two 400 GB hard drives, all IDE, on a > motherboard with one IDE controller and one SATA controller. Should > the hard drives be on the M/B, and the burners (rarely used) on the > card, or vice versa? > > Thanks in advance. > > Dotan Cohen Hi Dotan. The IDE PCI adaptor card I'm using on my old Gateway 500, is an MRI-PCI/A133, see http://www.mri.co.uk. I have 2 harddrives on ide0, 2 optical drives on ide1, one harddrive on the first channel of the adaptor card, and a dvdrom drive on channel2. My first problem was probably my own fault. I still have FC1 on the harddrive thats on the card, and had been booting FC1 from a floppy for years, until someone on the list showed me it was a drive mapping problem (now fixed) Problem #2, and unresolved. I can't boot a dvd from the dvdrom drive that's on the card, but may be down to the older BIOS on the Gateway machine. Once the machine is booted up though, there is no problem playing dvd's for example. All the best. Nigel.
