Bruce,

This new computer is to replace my current development system (I am a
freelance software engineer). I also prepared it for the upcoming
beta-testing.

Here is a summary of my current experiments. I won't have time to further
investigate the issues I had with my IDE optical drives. I think I tried all
possible combinations and none worked in my case.


The Giga-Byte GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard has 3 IDE ports:

- 2 green ones (IDE2/IDE3) which support ATA133 and RAID

- a pink one, a true IDE port which suppors ATA33/66/100.


I ran all my tests on the green ports with the "GigaRAID Function" setup
option set to ATA in "Integrated Peripherals" so that the GigaRAID
controller works as a true IDE/ATAPI controller.

I could not get any of my Plextor optical IDE drives PX-116A, PX-130A and
PX-712A to work on any of the IDE ports (IDE, IDE2 or IDE3). Only my old
Plextor PX-W2410 and my Maxtor 40GB IDE HDDs did work on any of the IDE
ports.

My quick and only solution for the optical drives were to buy 2 optical
Serial ATA (SATA) drives. So I bought 2 Plextor PX-712SA since I could not
find a SATA DVD reader.

Once I had my SATA optical drives, the remaining issue was to be able to
boot from a CD when a bootable CD is inserted in any of the optical drives.

With the F6 revision of the BIOS, my bootable CD are not detected as
bootable when the "SATA RAID/AHCI Mode" setup option is set to Disabled.
This always led to a Disk Error message since my HDDs were not formatted
yet.

On another hand I am able to boot from a CD when the SATA Mode option is set
to AHCI. The only drawback of this solution is that this mode requires an
Intel ICH6R (IAA) chipset driver diskette to install Windows.

AFAIK the SATA drives support in Windows XP is only available with the
Service Pack 1 and later.

I now have two possible working solutions, one with only SATA drives and one
with IDE HDDs and SATA optical drives.



* The mixed IDE/SATA solution:

- I plugged both my Maxtor HDDs to the true (pink) IDE port with a
80-conductor cable, one drive as master and the other one as slave.

- I plugged the first SATA optical drive to the SATA1 connector and the
second one to the SATA3 connector.

- In the BIOS, I set the related options like this:

On-Chip PCI IDE [ Enabled ]
SATA RAID/AHCI Mode [ AHCI ]
On-board H/W GigaRAID [ Disabled ]


Note: I could have used the GigaRAID ports instead of the true IDE, the
options would have been:

On-Chip PCI IDE [ Disabled ]
SATA RAID/AHCI Mode [ AHCI ]
On-board H/W GigaRAID [ Enabled ]
GigaRAID Function [ ATA ]

Hard Disk Boot Priority: 1. SCSI-0: IT8212


This solution would require to provide an ITE IT8212 chipset drivers
diskette during the Windows installation as well.



* The full SATA solution:

- I plugged my SATA Maxtor HDDs to the SATA1 and SATA3 connectors

- I plugged my SATA Plextor optical drives to the SATA2 and SATA4 connectors

- In the BIOS, I set the related options like this:

On-Chip PCI IDE [ Enabled ]
SATA RAID/AHCI Mode [ AHCI ]
On-board H/W GigaRAID [ Disabled ]




* Installing Windows XP

In either case, the installation of Windows is the same process.

- you first need to create the chipset diskette for the SATA controller in
AHCI mode. To do so, extract the files from "iaa40.exe" (on the CD provided
with the motherboard) to a diskette.

- Once the BIOS is configured, save the configuration and reboot with a
bootable CD of Windows XP SP1 in the first optical drive. Hit a key when the
message "Hit a key to boot from CD" appears. The Windows XP setup starts.

- When the message "Hit F6 for additional SCSI and RAID drivers" message
appears hit F6 and follow the steps to select a new driver from the
diskette. Select "82801FR AHCI".

- You can now successfully complete the Windows setup.


I hope this helps.

Regards,

Noël
http://noeld.com/