in which the writer poses a query concerning hardware connectivity

[transmothra]

because i don't know shit about 'puter guts:

Q: what happens when you have more drives than you have working ATA/IDE ports? is there any way to connect more than two devices to one port? i have 2 hard drives (one 8Gb for XP, one 80Gb for various documents and programs), and a DVD Rom, but only one of the socket thingies seems to work... at least, i think that's the case... when my pal Travis sent me his old (but still pretty bad-ass) gaming rig, i could never get it to recognize the DVD drive, after i had taken it off the ribbon it was on in favor of running the 2 hard drives on the same ribbon [definitely correct jumper settings be damned].

hey, shut up - i can still out-CSS you AND your cousin!

p.s., this may be of some interest, should you ever find yourself needing to play musical drives while trying desperately to get your PC to boot up after having suffered a sasser-like defeat at the foul hands of iomdisk.sys (and/or sasser itself, who knows?): http://hardwarehell.com/jumpers.shtml

Comments

[eboe.livejournal.com]

have you tried swapping out the IDE cxable connecting the dvd-rom to the other port? i'd say that's your best bet, as there is no way i am aware of to connect more than two devices to one ide port. the other solution is to buy a pci adapter that will add two more ide ports to your puter, but trying to swap out the connector cable is your least expensive investment.

thanks, G

[transmothra.livejournal.com]

i didn't think so... a PCI adapter sounds good, though. that's exactly what i was thinking of, i think... how do they work exactly? i'll think about that if swapping the cable doesn't work.

Re: thanks, G

[eboe.livejournal.com]

well, if a simple cable swap doesn't work, go for something like this: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductdesc.asp?description=16-115-009&depa=0
final cost would be $26, and you can run your other hard drive from it and keep the DVDrom drive on the main cable from the motherboard, as a slave device.