Two DVD burners

[Qacer]

Hi all,

I have an Asus A7V133 mobo. It has four IDE channels, two of which are supposed to be UDMA 100. The other two are just labeled as the primary (main) channels. In other words, any device I plug in to it will show up in the startup screen.
ex:
Primary Drive: Maxtor 40GB
Slave Drive: Maxtor 40GB
Secondary Drive: Sony DVD+RW
Slave Drive:

If I plug any devices on the UDMA channels, it does not show up in startup.


I'm curious about installing two DVD burners in the system (Sony DVD+RW and Pioneer A04). If I put my two hard drives in the UDMA 100 slots and my burners on the other two channels will it cause a conflict?

I'm not sure how the mobo handles this. I'm not even sure if I can select my 1st boot and 2nd boot devices as my hard drives if I connect them to the UDMA 100 channels.

Anyone with experience in this?

Thanks!


--sign here--
"I used Thevenin to simplify my motherboard's circuits."
--by me--

 

[juicebykurt]

The ATA100 ports are detected seperately than your normal ATA66 ports. There an option to enable the ATA100 in the bios. I believe it is defaulted to disable. When you enable it, you will get your normal post screen and then you will get a new screen where it looks for the ATA100 drives you may have connected. That's why those drives don't register when you connect them to the ATA100 ports, your bios isn't set to look for them there. And you should not have any conflicts if you connect both hard drives to the ATA100 ports and leave your other drives on the old ports. Just make sure you install the Promise Controller from your ASUS disk.

 

[Qacer]

Thanks for the tip! I think I'll do just that and move both of my hard drives to the ATA100 port. I was also told that both burners should be on a separate channel.

--sign here--
"I used Thevenin to simplify my motherboard's circuits."
--by me--

 

[thefaresteast]

if you want more IDE channel. you can fixed in the hotswap USB 2.0 to IDE. 480Mbps or DVD 10X writable... there isn't any right now. tested with confirmation, it can write 2.4X without any problems.

 

[ejsmith2]

On the A7v133, every channel on the board is UDMA mode5 capable. That promise chip is just there for Raid0 support, which the primary controller won't do.

The setting in the bios "enable ata100 bios" just lets you boot from that controller. You'll also get an extra 10 second delay (at least) while the drives show up on the POST screen. The controller is active, whether or not that option is disabled or enabled. But, if you don't have that option enabled, you can't boot from the secondary controller, regardless if you're running raid0 or not.

I'm guessing your using Win9x or Win2k, 'cause XP has native drivers for the controller. Once you load the promise drivers and Via's IDE drivers, any devices will show up inside windows, and with Udma mode5 cranked on. If your drives aren't showing up in those OS, then the problem is you do not have the promise drivers loaded. They are available off Asus's ftp, provided you can even get there (I think they switched servers or upgraded; it's gotten better than it was 6+ months ago).

If you want to setup a raid with those two hard disks, and boot from them, then you'll have to have that bios option enabled, and the two drives on seperate promise channels.

Oh, and Bios 1009 is out too. Might wanna flash.