Confused about IDE devices on P5GDC-V Deluxe

  • Thread starter Thread starter JP
  • Start date Start date
J

JP

While waiting for my P5GDC-V Deluxe to arrive I started reading through
the manual to figure out how I could get all my IDE devices connected.
I'll have two hard drives, a CD/DVD burner and a CD-ROM drive.

The board has:
Intel® ICH6R South Bridge:
- *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33
- *4 x Serial ATA with IntelR Matrix Storage Technology with RAID 0, 1
support
ITE® IDE RAID controller:
- * 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 with JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 support

The board has connectors PRI_IDE1, PRI_RAID1 and SEC_RAID1 (I'm not
using the SATA connectors). It also has two flavors of RAID (ITE and
Intel) which adds to my confusion even though I'm not using RAID. It
looks like PRI_IDE1 is the Southbridge channel and PRI_RAID1 and
PRI_RAID2 are on the ITE controller. (The manual doesn't really
specify) so I think I want to put the CD/DVD burner and the CD-ROM on
PRI_IDE1 and my two hard drives on PRI_RAID1.

According to the manual, the BIOS boot options just show a list of
devices attached. Nothing I could find mentions selecting a particular
controller (Southbridge or ITE) to boot from. And the only mention of
configuring RAID talks about the Intel RAID setup - nothing about the
ITE.

I don't understand how I will be able to specify what the boot device
is. I also don't understand if I can use the ITE RAID channels as plain
IDE (i.e. not using RAID at all).

I suppose it could be this easy:
1. Attach IDE devices to both controllers, and they will all be listed
in the BIOS when setting boot priority.
2. Ignore anything about RAID since I'm not using it.

Could that be right? Have I missed something? Do I need to configure
the RAID software in some fashion even though I'm not using RAID, or
can I ignore it totally?

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
The manual has lousy documentation on this. Ther is only a Primary
IDE (no secondary). While all the devices will be recognized in the
Bios, anything hooked to the RAID Primary or Secondary will only be
recognized in Windows -- which means that if you are installing
Windows XP do the following:

Primary IDE Master -- CD rom
Primary IDE Slave -- New hard drive

Then install Win XP onto hard drive. After installation is complete,
you can move the HD to the Primary RAID controller and it (along with
up to three more drives will be recognized even without a RAID 0 or 1
configuration.

I have tested the system with four IDE drives on the RAID controllers
(in a non-RAID configuration) along with two optical drives on the
Primary IDE.

One caveat about this MB. The C-Media audio chip set does NOT support
20dB microphone boost, which renders it useless for audio. Asus has
not been able to name a single microphone that will work with it.
 
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