D945GTP Problems..

[burris]

I just installed the mentioned board along with 3 Gb DDR2 ram..P4 HT Prescott 3.0Ghz 64bits. I upped the BIOS to 4098 and downloaded the latest drivers from Intel. I do not use RAID. I came off a BioStar board where it had 4 IDE slots and used DDR1 Ram. I have 2 IDE HDD drives and 1 IDE CDRom.

Since the new board only has a slot for 2 IDE drives, I bought 2 different sets of dongle converters to convert the IDE drives to SATA. Nothing worked with the first set, but with the second SY-JM-SIDE, I tried them on the HDD...although the BIOS recognized them, no boot. I then installed one on the CDRom and it works fine...except that although all 3 drives appear in the boot order, nothing changes when I try the boot change.

I have tried every combinating of BIOS configs...advanced..Normal, etc. What is missing that I don't know about? Would be nice if I could dongle both HDDs and plug into SATA and leave the CDRom in the IDE slot. If I could get that far, I wonder if the SATA drives would then be available in the boot order?

Thanks in advance....

[Apoptosis]

converters have always caused me issues... What IDE to SATA adapters are you using?

At this point in time you might want to update your drives be it the optical drives or even the HDD's so they are SATA and you can lose the adapters.

[burris]

converters have always caused me issues... What IDE to SATA adapters are you using?

At this point in time you might want to update your drives be it the optical drives or even the HDD's so they are SATA and you can lose the adapters.

Thanks for your reply....

Since I posted I have been in touch with Intel. Good communication and support.

The word is that they actually have a note in the docs that indicate only native hook ups will work, and they frown upon any of the SATA-IDE adapters. I wasn't looking for that and didn't see it.
==============
* You can find the information about IDE to SATA adapters at the following link:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-009252.htm

* IDE to SATA adapters are not going to be correctly recognized on most of the desktop boards, because the controllers and devices work very different, even though you do not need to get to SATA hard drives, you can get an IDE PCI card so you can plug your hard drives or CD-ROMs.

===========

What I was able to accomplish was to install the dongle on the CDRom and plug it into the SATA slot. It works fine with the exception of not being able to select it in the boot order via BIOS. Intel confirmed this. Their suggestion was that instead of replacing my perfectly good 160Gb drives, to get an IDE PCI card for about $15 and simply hook up the IDE drives to that. To me that sounds like a good thing to do. I have no problem with the speed, I don't do gaming, so all should go well.

Thanks for your help..