Hi Sue, thanks for your input and i wish i had known it earlier. but for the life of me i could not guess (as you seem to have correctly) that microsoft wrote codes in their os to detect ide cables rather than the drives! in fact i did get two cables (one for floppy and the other for ide) with my new mobo and both of them are still with me unpacked in their plastic covers! i am still struggling with the problem and let me see --God bless and have a nice day venkat viswanathan Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml