ATA 100 Adapter>MultipleDrives>Jumper&Connectors?

[JustLikenew]

Hi - I would like to install an ATA/100 PCI Adapter Card and I am unsure how to make all the connections re: jumpers & connectors. I have the following drives:
18 Gig HD (I would like this to be the PM boot drive)
8 Gig HD (Second OS or storage)
CD-ROM Drive
CD-RW ( Plextor indicates that this should be set as a Master)
Iomega Internal Zip

Other than putting the 18 Gig Boot drive on the card's 1st IDE connector as a Master, I am unsure how to connect and set the jumpers on everything; What goes on the card's IDE channels and what goes on the MB's IDE channels? Does anyone have experience with this and suggestions?

Many thanks!

[hiredgoonz]

It's a bit tricky to boot from a drive on an ata card, it can be done, but is the 18 gig drive ata100? If it's only ata66 or 33, then you're not going to see any benefit from running it on the card, as long as your motherboard supports ata66 (or whatever the hard drive is)

You can run the harddrives on the primary motherboard ide channel, the cdrom and zip drive on the secondary mobo channel and the cdrw on the card's primary channel...this way the neither the cdrom nor hd will share a channel w/the cdrw so you'll have better luck copying cds directly and just burning from the hd...

Just a suggestion, but it should work (similar to the setup I have now) Just make sure you set one drive as master and one as slave
for each channel, generally the master drive goes at the end of the cable, slave in the middle...good luck

[solstice]

Hi, kinda new to this whole thing and I have a question pretty similar to the original one:

Have a dell dimension xpsT PIII 450, 9 gig HD on primary ide on MB and cdrom and CD-rw on secondary ide on MB.

just bought a maxtor 7200 ata/100 30 gig drive and maxtor ata/100 pci add in card. Have been trying to install maxtor drive into computer attached as master to pci card instead of mb.

Problems:
1. Can't find settings for this new drive anywhere in bios
2. Booting up with the maxtor maxblast software, program recognizes that PCI drive 1 is not formatted and asks if i'd like to format it. When I tell it to make it one big partition, and copy dos files over, it looks like it starts up, but doesn't spin the drive at all.

I'd like to boot off the 30 gig drive off the pci card if possible. If anyone has any recommendations on how to do this, I'd greatly appreciate it. Answers'll probably have to be a little bit more descriptive than the average post here since I don't think I'm as tech savvy as most of the posters here. Thanks in advance.

[bassvax]

Solstice...did you set that partition as active?

------------------
Jerry

[solstice]

hmm...was never given the option anywhere to set it up as "active" couldn't find it in the bios set up and maxblast plus software just asked if I'd like to format it....to be honest only reason I ended up here on this board was because I caved in and called Dell customer support only to have the tech guy tell me that he had the same situtation in his computer at home, and that he had gotten it to boot off the card first, but since he was at work he couldn't tell me how he'd done it. sigh...any ideas anyone?