abit Ic7-max 3 setup help needed

[camtr]

I purchased the Abit Ic7-Max 3 motherboard. I have an Nec 2500a dvd recorder and a Sony crx320a cd-rw/dvd-rom drive. I will be using a Seagate 160gb sata hard drive. I was wondering what would be the best setup as far as master and slave goes for these 3 devices and what would that setting be in bios? I believe I could used them all as master devices if I want to because of the hard drive being sata.

I also have a question as to installing the hard drive. I will be using windows xp pro do I have to do anything special when I install the 160 gb hard drive to have it be shown and useable as 160gb?

This is only the second computer that I have built. In looking at my system components does anyone see any possible trouble or conflicts when I try to put this all together, and any tips for doing so. Thanks for any help.

System will be:
Antec Sonata case with 380 power supply.
Abit Ic-7 Max 3
Pentium 4 2.8c
2 sticks of 512mb adata ddr 500 ram
Nec 2500A dvd recorder drive
sony crx320a cd-rw/dvd drive
Radeon 9800 pro video card
Wintv-pvr 350 card
Planar px171m lcd Monitor
Logitec Cordless MX Duo keyboard & Mouse
Floopy drive

 

[Obtuse]

Yes, there's 2 IDE channels on that board, so if you're not planning on installing any more optical drives, make each one a master on one of the channels. As for your hard drive, windows only recognizes partitions larger than 137GB after SP1. So if you have an XP disk w/SP1 already installed, great. If not, need to split your drive into partitions < 137GB. There's more info on this <A HREF="http://support.octek.com.au/FAQ/faq_0113.htm" target="_new">here</A>

"If I owned this place and hell, I'd rent out this place and live in hell" - Toombs

 

[JP5]

Once you patch to SP2, you can join the two partitions in disk manager.

 

[camtr]

Thank you for the information.