I have 4 external (1394) enclosures with Maxtor 
drives in them (120GB). My experience with 
external boxes has not been very good. Eventually 
they all seem to fail. The drives seem to be OK, 
once I remove them and put them inside a desktop 
box. Maybe I am buying cheap enclosures.

The PC I am building is based on a 865PEDAP MoBo.

The ICH5 chipset supports:
           - 2 parallel ULTRA ATA100 sockets
- 2 serial ATA sockets

I have 2 IDE hard-drives drives already connected 
to one of the IDE sockets. A floppy and a DVD-ROM 
drive on the second. The Serial ATA sockets on 
the Mobo are empty, but a RAID SATA PCI adaptor 
takes care of the two small scuzzi drives. The 
IDE drives are jumpered for CS and I am using a 80-wire cable.

I don’t care if I have the SATA. They are an 
“inheritance” from the Mobo’s server days.

During boot up I see:

Primary Master: WDC
Primary Slave: None
Secondary Master: None
Secondary Slave: None

The system storage, after boot up, looks like this:

WDC WD1200BB-00CAA1 [Hard drive] (120.03 GB) -- drive 0
WDC WD1000BB-00CAA0 [Hard drive] (100.03 GB) -- drive 1
WDC WD40 0BB-75DEA0 SCSI Disk Device (40.00 GB) -- drive 2
LaCie Group SA LaCie Hard Drive FireWire+ IEEE 
1394 SBP2 Device [Hard drive] (250.06 GB) -- drive 3
USB 2.0 Flash Disk USB Device (1.00 GB) -- drive 4
ST316002 1A USB Device [Hard drive] (160.04 GB) -- drive 5
NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removable media [Floppy drive]


Local Drive Volumes (Drive Manager) are assigned thusly:

c: (NTFS on drive 0)           120.02 GB           115.09 GB free
d: (FAT32 on drive 1)           100.00 GB 44.09 GB free
e: (NTFS on drive 2)           40.00 GB     39.04 GB free
f: (FAT32 on drive 5)           160.00 GB 29.08 GB free
h: (FAT32 on drive 3)           250.00 GB 14.66 GB free

I remember something about 4 “devices” being the 
limit for IDEs, but don’t remember whether it was 
4 devices total, or up to 4 hard-drives. I guess 
I could take out the floppy drive, put a 
hard-drive in its place and use a USB or FireWire 
external floppy. But that still leaves me with an extra drive.

I really want at least two more of the IDE drives 
that used to be in 1394 enclosures inside the 
desktop box, if I can. So much so, in fact, that 
I am willing to build a second PC, if I have to 
and share one set of I/O devices via a KVM switch. If I must.

1. First, what in the world is happening during 
boot-up – how come the BIOS doesn’t see any of 
the drives except the SATA (as one drive)?

2. Secondly, can one put 4 (four) IDE hard-drives 
AND the floppy & the DVD-ROM drive (I got the 
space) on one Mobo? I would yank the SATA.

3, The two IDE sockets on the MoBo are colored 
red and white. The cable used for the floppy and 
DVD-ROM ends in a red plug. Any significance to this?

4. Is there some type of conversion method 
(cable, adapter card) that would allow me to 
install 2 IDE drives in the place of the SATA drives?


TIA

Andrew

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