motherboard IDE problem

[bitt3n]

Hey, got another annoying thing going on with my computer how bout that. It never ends I sweare, but here is the breakdown:

I got an AOpen nForce 2 Ultra 400 AK79D-400Max Motherboard with a Sempron 3000+ Processor as well as 512 RAM (the ram is compatable beleive me)

Now when I hooked all the cables up correctly, it wasn't a suprise to me that it did'nt read a few things, as I normally face such crap. So here is what happened:

I have 2 CD drives, and 2 Hard Drives, it only detects one cd drive and one hard drive. For example, If I hook up the 2 cd drives on the IDE cable correctly, it doesn't detect the hard drive, if I hook 2 hard drives up and 1 CD, it won't detect the hard drives. In other words, it only lets me use 1 cd drive and 1 hard drive. And yes, I have the right setting of slave/master drives and stuff.
Normally this won't be a problem but when I try to boot to the cd drive, it won't detect it. So I looked closer into BIOS and it only says part of the drive's name and the rest in odd ACII characters, so I made a dos startup disk and I proceeded to format my HD as I intended, but apparently the dos startup disk you make with winxp doesn't support the format command whatsoever.

I'm fresh out of ideas, I switched the IDE cables out on the board, everything. The video card, processor, keyboard and RAM are compatable, I made sure of it. Anybody have the slightest idea of any other things I could do?

I don't want to hear some smartass post about "hit your board with a hammer" or some retarded crap like that. It was cute the first five minutes and now it's annoying as hell. I was up till 4 am messing with this thing and I spent this morning from noon till right now messing around with this crap. If anybody has any ideas, be sure to post here please.
(In case your wondering, I'm posting on my dad's computer)

 

[joelslaw]

Originally posted by: bitt3n
I have 2 CD drives, and 2 Hard Drives, it only detects one cd drive and one hard drive. For example, If I hook up the 2 cd drives on the IDE cable correctly, it doesn't detect the hard drive, if I hook 2 hard drives up and 1 CD, it won't detect the hard drives. In other words, it only lets me use 1 cd drive and 1 hard drive. And yes, I have the right setting of slave/master drives and stuff.

not to be dense, but I'm a bit confused. Are you trying to hook up the 2 hdd's on the primary and the 2 cd's on the secondary, vis versa, or are you trying to connect 1 hdd and 1cd on each channel. Also are the drives it's not detecting always in the same position (like it will not detect the drive in primary slave regaurdless of which drive) or is it just random positions? Any other info you could give in this area would be helpful.

 

[joelslaw]

I also found this pic of your bios:
http://www.hardocp.com/image.h...FkSlRfMl8yNl9sLmdpZg==
set the first 10 settings, just like they have them here (enabled, auto, auto, auto, auto, enabled, auto, auto, auto, auto)

 

[joelslaw]

did this work, did it not work, ....... did it kinda work?

 

[bitt3n]

thanks for the info I will check it out now

 

[bitt3n]

thanks problem solved!!!