ATA100 and ide conections on same mobo

Noobie Alert! Very little experience working on mobo's but have messed with memory and expansion cards enough to know what they do. Been with Windows since the days of dos and IBM xt's.

Ive got an older PC using an asus a7v mobo. It offeres an ide connection and an ata100 connection. Im only using the ide connections, with a master 40 g hd on the primary and a dvd rom device on the secondary master.

Ive never used ata100 before. Can I use my regular IDE disks and cd/dvds on it? Connectors look similar (but I really didnt do a one for one comparison)

Srtange thing about this ide connection.....it wont allow me to add a 100G drive to the primary chain (as a slave device)...wont pass post. Im thinking that maybe I could use the ata100 chain????? Or maybe I can use the ata chains in addition to the ide chains and still boot off the 40 G primary master drive?

Just use 80-wire cables for everything, even the optical drives. On your MB, the "IDE" connectors are really ATA-66 connectors, and thus also require 80-wire cables to work at full speed, just as do the ATA-100 connectors. Some drives have 3 types of jumper settings: master, slave, and "single-drive", so make sure they are set correctly for each drive.