Al440lx problem with harddisk and cd-rom drive

Hi Mervyn,

The optimal configuration is to have the hard drive(s) on the Primary IDE
channel and the CD-ROM on the Secondary IDE channel. Also make certain to
set the "strapping" (aka Master / Slave) properly and appropriately. Some
hard drives have "3" settings, Single, Master, Slave, I have yet to see any
true ATAPI CD-ROM have anything other than Master / Slave. You may need to
purchase an additional IDE ribbon cable but the couple of dollars is worth
the increase in system performance and fewer headaches.

Once you've recabled your drives separately make sure you go into the BIOS /
CMOS and set the "Reset Configuration Data" to YES and, if you're running
Windows 9x, make sure that Plug and Play OS is also set to YES. If you
experience "slow windows startups" you may also experiment with setting the
CD-ROM in the BIOS to NONE instead of either AUTO or CD-ROM.

Hope that helps, write back if you need more info.

Vic ... ;-)

.

3.2gb hd and 24x ide cd-rom drive, without the cd-rom drive the harddisk
boots up fine, until i plugged in the cdrom drive the motherboard seems to
detect the cd-rom drive as atapi blah blah then doesn't detect my harddisk
at all. then it would go missing operating system. harddisk is on pri master
and cdrom drive is on pri slave. please reply asap.

Try moving the cdrom to the secondary ide connector. You might also set the
so it doesn't auto-detect the cdrom.
Good Luck
Bob Martin