Gigabyte GA-8PE667

you have to turn off the RAID controller (either by BIOS or jumper) to make it act as a regular IDE controller.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

I was looking in the Bios and I saw it was set to ATA as default, so I thought that was all I needed... I will have to take a better look at that. Thanks.

oh, that does sound correct.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

on page 37 of the manual, do you also have "Onboard ATA/RAID device" enabled?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

Yes. Is that wrong?

not, that is correct. Sounds like you've done everything right.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

First of all, are you planning to run the 2 drives over raid? I would run them over RAID if I were you. If not, what I would do is put the 2 drives on IDE 1 and 2, and place the cdrom on IDE3. Make sure that you have the RAID disabled in the bios, and make sure that all your drives jumpers are set to cable select, not master. Only use the master/slave if you have 2 drives on 1 IDE channel.

And in case you were wondering, yes you can place PIO devices on the RAID controller. Gigabyte doesn't use the lite version of the promise chip, so you can run your cdrom on there as well.

Good luck...

i know this may sound silly but after you installed the os did you use the cd and install the drivers for it?

also do not disable the raid in the bios or you loose the use of the slots.

i have the same mobo and i don't have a raid array setup. i have my hd on ide1, my dvd-rom on ide2 and my cd-rw on ide3. my cd-rw comes up in the device manager as a scsi, but that's because i'm using ide3 for it and they all work great.

I have the board also. You don't lose the use of the slots of u disable the RAID. You have to disable it, meaning use as ATA133 not as RAID.

OK, bear with me I am a complete novice!!

I have 2 hard drives, and DVD drive and a CDRW, can i put each one of these on its own ide port?? If you can how would I do it, I have the 8PE667 Ultra arriving tomorrow and would love to get it set up straight away. If anyone knows, could they kindly describe the process in basic terms. Many thanks in advance!

You should NOT put the CDROM on the Raid/ATA slots. The docs tell you not to do it.
In BIOS - enable ATA/RAID and set the next line to ATA.
Slot 0 should be the main hard drive.
Slot 1 should be the CDROM
Slot 2 which is the ATA/RAID slot should be Hard Drive 3.
IF you get another CDROM/CDRW/DVD slave it on Slot 0 or Slot 1.
I've seen very few CDROM/CDRW/DVD that go faster than ATA33 and the built in ATA/RAID slots do not support slower than ATA66.

Another option is to set boot for the ATA/RAID and then put both hard drives on the ATA/RAID slots 2&3 leaving the normal slots open for the CDROM/CDRW/DVD.

Every working computer must be improved .... or replaced ...

Yes, that config will work just fine, but you can run the cd-rom on ATA/RAID IDE connectors. This board doesn't use the lite version of the promise raid controller, hence the ability to run optical drives on those connectors. The only thing you really have to concern yourself with, is if you have 2 HD and are not going to run them over RAID, then drive 1 will have to be on IDE 0. The rest won't make much of a difference.
Like Jeff said though, there is a recommended config. in the manual, but I've placed my drives in 5 different configs now, including having my optical drives on the promise controllers, and they have all worked well.
I ended up with RAID 0, and putting my opticals on the first IDEs for it gives me the best speed of course...

Once again, great board!
Good luck...

IF the opticals are DMA 66, then they may work. The Docs do specifically say not to DMA33 on the ATA/RAID connections. My attempts to DMA33 a CDROM on the ATA/RAID connection failed. Most CDROM or DVD or CDRW units that I have found are DMA33 or slower. The most recent 48X CDRW we bought was only DMA33. We bought two different models recently in hopes of exceeding DMA33.
I have only seen one DMA66 CDROM drive. There may be others.

Every working computer must be improved .... or replaced ...