GA-EP45-UD3R IDE Controller?

Hi All,

An currently configuring a new GA-EP45-UD3R board with a Q9550 CPU, 4GB of Corsair Dominator RAM, a Radeon 4870 video card, a Plextor 708A DVD/CD-RW (IDE), Windows XP Pro SP3 completely updated, and a couple of Seagate SATA drives connected to the South Bridge only. I am not using RAID or the Gigabyte SATA connectors.

So, I am a bit confused. I am trying to run in a JBOD configuration (the two drives are 500GB and 750GB so they can't be a proper RAID anyway) and the CD/DVD drive is an IDE drive on the IDE connector as a master. I have been able to install XP directly from the CD. I have the SATA ports configured as IDE only so they should be seen as standard SATA drives there. Everything appears functional except for a couple of items I can't seem to figure out.

Booting to a Bart-PE CD, I am able to run the tool off the CD and Acronis True Image plugin. I can NOT run Acronis True Image from my TI recovery CD as it can not see the SATA drives. Presumably, the TI CD does not have proper drivers to see the SATA drives whereas Bart-PE does. When I created the Bart-PE CD, I did not add any drivers from the Gigabyte CD.

I also have a Norton Ghost CD that apparently doesn't function correctly as it doesn't seem to like the CD/DVD drive (it loads it's DOS command prompt but can't see the CD/DVD drive to run the tools) and I also can't seem to use Roxio Easy Media Creator in Windows as it can't see the DVD as a default recorder though Windows burns data to the drive as does an old version of Nero (don't worry, I don't have both Nero and Roxio installed at the same time, I am building different images of my OS drive and restore them independently when necessary).

This appears to me to be an oddity with the board/BIOS as the CD/DVD and SATA hard drives are not being recognized across the board as simply standard drives. The Seagate drives as well as the Plextor CD/DVD were used with my old board and were all detected properly. Only real difference here is the motherboard (the other components should not really interfere here).

So am I missing something with the SATA and IDE ports on this motherboard?

If anyone needs more info, I can supply it.

Thanks,

Robert