Enhanced IDE provides for a Primary and Secondary channal
for the IDE interface.   Then you break each channel into two
drives or a Master and a slave.  Hence you have the ability to
have four IDE drives.   If you have one hard drive, it should be
placed on the Primary channel as a Master drive.  You can place
a CD Rom drive as the Slave on this channel.  Then the Secondary
is vacant and can be disabled.

However...  if you have multiple hard drives and/or CD Rom drives
you may use both channels.   If you have three hard drives and
a CD Rom drive, you would put two drives on the Primary as
Master & Slave.  You would then put the third hard drive and the
CD Rom drive on the Secondary channel as Master & Slave.

Most motherboards today have two connectors for IDE drives.
One is the Primary & the other is the Secondary.  You attach
a standard IDE ribbon cable to each connector and then it has
two drive connectors on the cable.

If you only have a one or two drives...  they can both be on the
Primary channel.  Then you can disable the secondary.

The conflict you mentioned should be examined.  IRQ 14 & 15
should be assigned to these channels.  You should also
examine what memory address these channels are seeking.
No other device should be requesting an address commonly
used by your IDE controllers.

   Bob



At 04:31 PM 2/27/98 -0500, you wrote:
>This was posted several days ago but I haven't seen any replies. Can anyone
>help?
>
>Can anyone explain what the Secondary IDE Controller does ?
>
>About 6 months ago I did a reinstall of Win95a and noticed under Device
>Manager/Hard Disk Controllers that this device was listed as causing a
>conflict. I disabled the device with the intention of looking into it after
>I returned from a business trip. I completely forgot about it and the system
>has been running fine without it.
>
>I recently ordered a Beta copy of Win98 and expect when I install it this
>device will be shown as causing a conflict. If it does should I disable it
>again or try to resolve the conflict ?
>
>My Device Manager/Hard Disk Controllers presently shows the following:
>    Primary IDE Controller (Single FIFO)
>    Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller
>    Standard IDE/ESDI Hard Disk Controller
>
>Looking forward to your input.
>
>Joe Trimarchi
>
>