Raid Slot to simple IDE Channel? Bios advice needed

[aussteve]

I recently purchased a gigabyte motherboard, ga8knxp. This board offered the ability to have more than the standard 2 IDE primary and secondary slots, by having RAID slots in the form of IDE3 and IDE4. As I have the primary hard drive on IDE1 and a cd burner on IDE2, I wished to add a simple cd rom to IDE3 as a basic IDE device, and I have had nothing but difficulty. I do not run RAID in any form, and consequently find the BIOS settings confusing IE enable GIGARAID controller? etc etc. Can anyone offer me advice as to how to configure the above?
Much appreciated

 

[bcastner]

Why not add the drive as a slave on IDE 2?

 

[aussteve]

Thanks for your reply.
I had the drives set up exactly as you suggested prior to the upgrade but later found that the burner ran at ata33 and the reader, being newer, ran at ata 66, which seemed to cause confusion often when using programs such as Nero.
Thus the opportunity to place each drive on its own IDE controller seemed attractive as a solution.

 

[bcastner]

If they really are RAID controllers, I think you are out of luck. I know of no single drive "RAID" configurations.

You would have better luck with an 80 conductor IDE cable rated at least to ATA66. Make the faster drive the Master, the slower drive the slave. The next step would be to obtain newer chipset drivers for the system board. I know the Intel chipset drivers and the VIA drivers (I believe) and the SiS drivers would let you set the DMA mode of each device independently which should be enough for Nero and other burning programs.

 

[KimLeece]

I have an Asus board with a similar setup - IDE3&4 can be used as IDE or RAID. I have to specify which in the BIOS. I should think that will also be the case for you - search your BIOS options and disable anything to do with RAID. My board also has a further hardware option to enable/disable RAID which is a jumper - you should be able find things like that in the board manual.

Kim Leece.

 

[aussteve]

My thanks to both of you for your time and suggestions. I will look into it further
Steve