HD/DVD setup help needed

OK, I got my new SATA DVD burner, and it's working great. Since I only have 2 IDE drives now, I took the opportunity to ditch the extra IDE controller I had plugged into the PCI slot, and now, things are a bit sluggish WRT hard drive access. There's a high probability that it relates to having both IDE drives on the same controller (slave and master), but I wanted to make sure I had everything set up properly.

After 4 years with my old INTEL board, I was pretty comfortable with the BIOS and in XP's Device Manager, but I'm a bit off my game with the new one. . .for example, I have NINE entries under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, whereas on my old board, I only had four. I think some of them might be left over from the IDE board, but I don't know which ones.

So, here's some info, and when you have the time, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at it, and let me know what I should check, and/or what additional info you need.

Thanks!

Link to add'l motherboard info:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mother...Name=GA-P35-S3G

Windows XP, SP2
2 Gigs RAM

Currently I have installed:
1 SATA DVD drive
2 IDE HD

Motherboard has:
1 IDE connector
4 SATA connectors

I have removed the IDE controller I previously had plugged into the PCI slot.

Doc,

Since I have a Gigabyte mobo that is similiar to yours, I checked at that matches mine exactly.

A couple things I would look at. What speed controller's are on the Hard Drives? If one is older and slower, it will cause both to run slower to compensate. I ran into this one time when I put an older CD Rom on the same channel as my main Hard Drive. It killed me.

Did the location of your swap file happen to change somehow?

Atomm wrote:Doc,

Since I have a Gigabyte mobo that is similiar to yours, I checked at that matches mine exactly.

A couple things I would look at. What speed controller's are on the Hard Drives? If one is older and slower, it will cause both to run slower to compensate. I ran into this one time when I put an older CD Rom on the same channel as my main Hard Drive. It killed me.

Did the location of your swap file happen to change somehow?

Well, the first Primary IDE channel says it's running at Ultra DMA Mode 4, and the third Primary IDE channel says it's running at Ultra DMA Mode 6. All the other entries under IDE ATA ATAPI controllers are set to "auto-detection" and "DMA if available", and all settings say "Not Applicable" under Current Transfer Mode.

So I have two HD drives under Primary IDE Channel and none under Secondary IDE channel, which seems odd to me. . .especially since there is only ONE IDE controller on the motherboard, and I'm accustomed to a Primary and Secondary drive when two drives are on one IDE controller.

Hmmmm, weird. Yeah, looks like my swapfile HAS changed. Looks like I was using a 2 gig swapfile on my C: drive, which is odd. I don't have a lot of room on that drive, so I usually have my swapfile as a 3 gig fixed size on another partition. I'll reset it and see if it makes a difference. Thanks.