P5WD2-E Premium Not Rcognizing EIDE

Mogul12

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May 26, 2006
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I have an Asus p5wd2-e motherboard. Connected to the IDE connector in the middle of the motherboard I have 2 DVD burners. I have one SATA hard drive in SATA port 1. Lastly I have 2 hard drives connected to the EIDE port at the bottom. My problem is the bios is not recognizing anything plugged into the EIDE port. I know the hard drives are working since I can get them to work in the regular IDE port.

I have noticed in the bios that I have primary master and slave, third master and slave, and fourth master and slave. But no secondary master and slave. I cannot find a way to enable this. Is the motherboard broken or is there a setting I am missing. I would prefer not to have to take everything apart and send it back.
 

icbluscrn

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Well if your 2 harddrives on the red connector at the botton you need to install the driver on the cd or website put it on a foppy. you are also going to need the sata/raid driver installed (f6 ) when during install of xp.

also check page 4-16 in the user guide.
 

Mogul12

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Why and where would I need to install drivers for the EIDE port. I have never needed drivers when connecting hard drives with and IDE cable. I have a SATA hard drive which can be seen by the bios, this is the hard drive I installed Windows on without any problems.

I am not having any issues with Windows installation, only the recognition of secondary hard drives for storage.
 

icbluscrn

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well on your sata what kind of transfer rates are you getting?
the red connector has a different controller {Marvell} and if you go to the asus forums you'll see all the problems with that stupid eide.

If you have xp installed already you can get the marvell info from the mobo cd.



"The Marvell is nothing but trouble, although SATA seems to work okay... PATA sucks for most people, e-SATA doesn't work the way it should, and no RAID was available at all until recently... The Marvell is a PCI-device, which means it pumps it's transfers over the PCI-bus at 33 Mhz. to the DMI-bus... All devices on PCI-bus fight for control of the bus, even slowing down and raising CPU-usage more...

The ICH7 is a clear winner here, both in fucntionality that works and performance...
If you can do it with the ICH7, stick with it..."

also "dont use the red ide connector and buy a Promise udma133 PCI card"
 

Mogul12

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It seems to work ok now. I aven't changed anything. All I did is reset the Bios, then change it to my own settings and then reboot. It definitely seems to be finicky. My goal is to everntually upgrade to another 500GB SATA drive.

Eventually