Connecting 3 Optical & 1 HD to Abit TH7II-R Mobo?

[dangerpowers]

I just bought a sony DRU-500AX DVD writer...but the bios on my Abit TH7-II Raid wont recognize the drive. I have a western digital 120gb 8mb hd on the primary IDE, and a Toshiba DVD-Rom (master) and Plextor 40/12/40A cdrw (slave) on the secondary IDE and the DVD writer is on IDE 3. Win XP Pro only recognizes it as a cd-drive and it wont read/write dvds at all. I want to use all 3 optical drives..is there a better way to connect them all? please help & thank you in advance.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by dangerpowers on 05/17/03 04:14 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Boilermaker]

i have an abit be7-raid (845pe chipset, not the 850) and it also has a highpoint raid controller. way in the back of the manual, under do's and donts, it says not to connect any atapi devices to the raid controller (ide3 and 4 on my board). i tried to download the manual for your mobo from the abit site to see if it had the same notation, but the page wasnt available.

you may want to try moving your hard drive to ide3 and making the dvd writer the master on ide1. it may not be the optimal way to set it up, that depends on what drives get used more. but it may solve your problems with the operating system properly using your new dvd writer.

 

[khha4113]

Buy a cheap IDE controller from <b><A HREF="http://www.siig.com/products/ide/features/UltraATA100.html" target="_new"><font color=red>SIIG</A></b></font color=red> (~$30) which states supporting for ATAPI devices (Optical) to connect your CDs.

Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[elzt]

Only hard disk drives should be connected to the RAID channel, IDE3/4 in your case. Like Boiler said, move the HD to IDE3 with jumper set as master. Connect the DVD burner to primary master and leave the remaining 2 optical drives alone. Also remember to set the IDE3/4 to function as ATA instead of RAID in the main BIOS.