ok, I have a few questions. First I bought a dvd burner, while installing it I switched it to master. And switched my dvd rom drive to slave. What drive do I want to go along with the dvd burner, my cd burner or the other dvd rom drive? And how come I have three bays and I'm only able to hook 2 drives up, is there some kind of splitter, or would I have to disconnect the floppy drive and use that ide connection? I'm using winXP home.

Sorry if this is confusing?

Thanks for any help.

firstly... you have the IDE that connects to your floppy, that's primarily for FLOPPY...

the primary IDE can have any OPTICAL (cdrom,DVD-rom, whatever...) or HARDDISK combination connected, also the secondary IDE can have the same combinations...you should have two(2) IDE cables or four(4) IDE connectors.. now assuming you have only one harddrive, you can connect another optical to the IDE cable the harddisk is connected to, so there you have three opticals to fill your bays and one harddrive to store your info

(Also, when using a harddisk and optical combination, the harddisk should always be connected to the IDE0 "master" connector and the optical should be on the secondary "slave" connector)
so illustrated, it'll look like...

IDE0-----Harddisk---Optical


IDE1-----Optical----Optical


Now possibility #2...

you should check your mobo for a [url=http://img.ezguide.co.kr/spec_img/boa/GA-81PE1000MK-SATA-Port-O.jpg]Serial ATA port[/url].. you can use these to connect drives also, SATA is faster, btw..
good luck, my friend

I actually have 2 internal hard drives and 1 external. I wanted to use my dvd rom and my dvd burner together to make back ups of my dvd collection. I also wanted to keep my cd burner to burn cds. Maybe I don't need my dvd rom, I don't know. Is there an ide cable that has more connections than slave and primary? I think that's what I was trying to find. I guess what it comes down to is what 2 drives to use.

hm.. keep the external on [usb or firewire (or whichever port you're using)] and the two internal on the primary channel (master and slave of IDE0, make sure the jumpers are set correctly), and put the DVDrom and the DVDburner on the secondary channel (IDE1 master and slave, cable select should work with both opticals, if not then set them accordingly), and that'd be just perfect

so don't use my cd burner? and if that's what your recommending will my dvd burner still be able to burn cd's?

Even if there was such a cable, the IDE controller on the mobo wouldn't support it. Since you have one IDE device too many, you can always add a PCI card with a couple of additional IDE controllers on it. That would give you four more potential IDE devices to add.

Click here for an example.

Edit: Your DVD burner should also be capable of burning CDs.

yes, as far as I know, all DVD burners can burn cds

so if I got that, I'd be able to hook 4 more ide devices up, right?

so just use the dvd burner and the dvd rom drive for right now until I can get a pci card.

if you're taking that route, I'd suggest a PCI SATA card with connectors and an SATA drive, but it looks to me like you'll be fine burning cds with your DVD burner

also, the dvd burner should be set to master on the primary connector, or else hd>to>dvd transfers will take ridiculous amounts of time to complete

Provided you have a PCI slot available, correct.
Yes, you can to that. On the other hand, do you really need that third optical drive? It seems redundant. Nonetheless, if want to still use it, the PCI card is the best route I can think of.

I think I might have 4 empty pci slots. So burning a cd on the dvd burner will work the same way as the cd burner did right? I usually use WMP to burn cd's. And I have Nero ultra 6 for the dvd's.

What do you mean by this " hd>to>dvd"?

say if you were to copy a video DVD using dvd shrink and nero.. you first must copy the DVD to your harddrive and re-encode it (using dvd shrink) and then the burning process takes the image from the harddrive (hd)> and transfers it (to)> the DVD(dvd)...

try burning a cd with your DVD burning once and post the result.. I'm sure it'll work fine

Do I use WMP to copy it to the HD or how do I copy the dvd to my hard drive?

first get anydvd (freeware) and DVDshrink (also freeware). search google for these..

anydvd bypasses copy protection and dvdshrink minimizes the size of the file to fit on a DVD-R.. dvdshrink will also intergrate with the nero engine and burn the DVD for you after encryption..

(make sure anydvd is running at all times during the process)

Ok. For some reason my computer still thinks my dmaster) is a cd drive and my eslave) is the dvd drive. the eslave) drive doesn't recognize dvd's but the dmaster) does. I checked the bios and that all looks good, in the device manager it says the correct disc drive names, so I'm not sure what to do.

I was able to burn the .vob and other misc files on to the dvd, but it would not play in the dvd player that's hooked up to my tv, what do I need to be able to watch the dvds?

Quote " Ok. For some reason my computer still thinks my dmaster) is a cd drive and my eslave) is the dvd drive. the eslave) drive doesn't recognize dvd's but the dmaster) does. I checked the bios and that all looks good, in the device manager it says the correct disc drive names, so I'm not sure what to do."

Just go to device mgr and right click on the cd\dvd drive in question and click on "scan for hardware changes". That will fix you up.

Alright, I'll try that tonight, hopefully that works. If it doesn't I'll be posting again tomorrow.

What I did was unhooked one of my internal hard drives and ran my dvd burner off that slave ide cable, and left the cd burner and regular dvd rom drive hooked up how they were. This seems to work but for some reason my dvd rom won't recognize discs.

I'm also wondering how to burn a dvd so that I'm able to watch it on my dvd player.