2nd harddrive, new twist on old question

[Hillbilly]

My new system is a month old, but still no recording, except on the dusty old 4track. I have 1Gig Athlon, 5400 & new 7200rpm harddrives, 512 megs of fresh RAM, Audiophile soundcard and Sonar. After spending what was an inordinate amont of my spare time overcoming what were probably minor problems, it's all installed & apparently working.

BUT, among the many gems I've gleaned from Homerec., I know that the best configuration for the harddrives is to have each the master on the IDE controller, with the CDR and CDRW drives as slaves. Problem is the cables won't come close to reaching that far, and I've been told longer ones won't work (plus I can't find any here in the hills).

SO, a helpful tech from work gave me his old ATA66 controller card, the plan was to hook the CD drives to it and leave the hard drives as masters on the motherboard. But I've beat my brains out on this thing, I get various problems, BIOS won't load, drivers won't load, etc. I think it's not going to work. My questions are 3:

1. Should I run out & get a new controller card & keep at it?
2. Are there other tricks to get around this problem?
3. Does it matter that much? I'm itching to start cursing the software learning curve instead of the hardware, at least I'll have some music to play when my wife sees the charge card and I'm recovering from the emotional brow-beating.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Emeric]

Yes the old cable problem. Almost like they designed it to be annoying.

Set the CD/CD-RW as slave on the same ribbon as the 7200RPM drive. Try it and see if it works ok first before going crazy.

There are ways to overcome the cabling issues.

5.25" harddrive brackets, allowing you to put the drives up nearer the 5.25" devices, i.e. CD-ROMs etc. By arranging the drives in such a way (hard drive on top), the cabling becomes possible.

Try it the way you have it, life is too short.