how to connect 2 hdd and a dvd burner and a cdrw on asus mobo???

[tt2by2]

i am a newbie with computers, so the following discourse might seem a
bit redundant and i know just enough to get into trouble ;)
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i have 2 western digital 40 gig hard drives and 2 cd burners(one is a dvdrw and the other a cdrw).
in my old mother board they connected to the primary and secondary IDE
sockets in pairs. primary ide had the two hdd's=master/slave and the secondary ide had dvdrw as master and cdrw as slave

yet, in the p5gd2 premium
(see http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/sock...p/overview.HTM) motherboard there is only one IDE socket (a blue 40 pin socket
located on the bottom edge of the mobo as seen in the figure). the only other 40 pin connectors are two red ide raid sockets (primary and secondary) .

i can connect the two hard drives to the only (and listed as primary) IDE socket, but then how do i connect the 2 cd burners to the mother board?

i have heard that the hard drives might be able to connect to the mobo
through the pci sockets with a special card which would free up the
IDE for the burners, but would the computer be able to boot up in this
configuration?

the mobo package came with a hdd cable and a cdrom cable- why supply
both if there is but the one IDE socket? or can the red primary and secondary raid_1 sockets be used for the hard drives ? or even for the dvd/cd rw's? on one hand the specification seems to indicate that only hard drives can be used on the raid sockets. on the other hand, my product manual says "the default setting for the raid connector is IDE". does this then mean that these raid sockets could function like secondary and even tertiary ide sockets and could handle dvd/cd rw's??

the specification
(see http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=...emium&langs=09 )
describes the storage as having an intel southbridge supporting 1 x
ultra dma and a ITE 8212fIDE raid controller supporting 2 x ultra
dma. my interpretation of this is that the intel southbridge works
with the blue IDE connector "PRI_IDE1" and raid controller
communicates with the two red sockets PRI_RAID1 and SEC_RAID1 (see
lowermost of the figure . my reasoning is that while the two red
sockets are for RAID, they nevertheless could support the cd burners .
would then the total of 3 dma sockets support a total of 6 devices on
three cables (both hard drives or cd burners)? can the computer only
boot up via the primary IDE cable with the hard drive on the master?

to reiterate (please be patient) how do i get 2 hard drives and 2 cd
burners to connect to this mobo when there appears to be only one (primary) ide socket?

please correct me and discuss.

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next, can the mobo support windows 98?
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[Darthtanion]

Re: how to connect 2 hdd and a dvd burner and a cdrw on asus mobo???

Just out of curiosity, have you ever considered creating a RAID array with the 2x 40's? You can boot from a RAID and get a bit better performance to boot. That would leave your normal IDE port to be used with the optical drives.

Just a thought.

[tt2by2]

Re: how to connect 2 hdd and a dvd burner and a cdrw on asus mobo???

thanks for input-

i plan to use the hard drives and master and slave, and then periodically image the master drive on to the slave with powerquest drive image (much quicker than burning cd's or dvd's) so as to back up the hard drive.

to go this route, i assume its just a matter of setting the bios for the IDE_RAID ports as default, which the manual indicates as "standard ide"?

[Darthtanion]

Re: how to connect 2 hdd and a dvd burner and a cdrw on asus mobo???

That's the way it works on my SATA enabled motherboards. They are fully RAID capable and I simply enable the SATA channels and I can use them as normal bootable drives without creating a RAID. I can't say for sure it will work for you too with normal IDE devices, but I'd say odds are good it will.

[fielans]

Re: how to connect 2 hdd and a dvd burner and a cdrw on asus mobo???

what if my hard drive is 1 SATA and 1 ATA?
they couldn't be configured as RAID could they?

currently i have my cd-rw set as primary master and my ATA 80GB HDD as primary slave on PRIMARY IDE on motherboard. The SATA is on third master.

I connect my dvd-rom to PRI_RAID1 and not detected on windows.

any help please?