Now that I am in the midst of repairing my computer, I was hoping someone could help me find the optimal alignment for attaching my four drive to the MOBO.

The MOBO is an ABIT IC7-G MAXII 478 Intel 875P ATX Intel Motherboard, a few years old, along with the rest of my system. I got them all working at once, but every once in a while I have problems with one or more of them not being recognized. The manual seems pretty easy to follow, but I cant make it work quite right.

The four drives are a 37 gig WD hard drive 10,000 rpm
a 250 gig maxtor hard Drive
a CD Burner, DVD Rom
and a DVD Burner

The 37 gig drive is SATA, the other three are parallel, although I have parallel to serial converters that I have used to make them all SATA. My MOBO has 2 IDE slots, and 4 SATA slots (2 on chip and 2 on board). I not sure if 4 SATA slots are really the best way to go, or if I should use the regular IDE slots.

However, when I hook the drives up to the four SATA slots, I can never get the SATA 1 and 2 to work at the same time as 3 and 4.

I recently had to clear the CMOS setting to fix another problem and now I can figure out how I got them all to work. If anyone is familiar with this MOBO please help.

Let me know if you need more info. Hopefully as soon as I get this problem fixed, I can go about fixing the other problem that I posted on this forum.

Thanks.

Well first of all, those PATA drives should really be used on PATA. Converters introduce strange problems sometimes and have generally been flaky for me.

Secondly, you need to go into the BIOS and set the native SATA ports to IDE emulation. They'll still have the advantages of SATA but with more native BIOS/software support. The extra chip-based SATA ports will need to be configured in the chip's BIOS (since it's a RAID device, it has bootable priority and its own BIOS).

You may also want to check for the last BIOS update for that mobo, if it doesn't have it already. The i865/875 series of chipsets were the first to have native SATA. The BIOS updates were enormously useful for SATA functionality!

Agree. Unless there is some very special reason for using converters (perhaps to add to a RAID set) then keep the hardware on slots that were originally designed for them.

Very Helpful. Thanks.