Karl

If your second HDD has a single partition on it then BladeRunner was right. I would go ahead and check which drive letter it's using, because of ramdrives. The letter will change because dos can't tell what that "ntfs" stuff is . Have you tried different drive letters? -Karl

Ok, so if I understand correctly the drive doesn't work as long as you have the HDD installed going back to PIO mode is only going to make your computer slower. I personaly have a 233 PII that I ran windows on with two cdroms in udma and two HDD's in udma. So most likely it isn't because of the CPU speed (if you've got a 350). As for dos in windows 2000. You're correct there is no "boot to dos" but just make a win98 boot disk and "poof" you've got dos (althought you won't be able to access your ntfs partitions). It sounds like a driver problem personaly. It could also be because of a flaky controller. Did it work in udma in other operating systems? I'd be curious to see if just 2k has the problem... Hope this gives you a few more ideas of where to look. -Karl

Couple of ideas, First of all I'm not clear have you tried the CD-ROM in dos or just windows. Does it do the exact same thing in windows? And when you put the drive in does it acutally attempt to read the cd (spin up) or just pop the sucker right back out. Anyway a few things to try, Remove ALL other ide devices and put it on the primary master and boot off of a cd. If this works your know your drive and the mobo are talking fine. If that does work next would be to put the DVD as slave on primary and the HDD as master thus proving that the full primary chain works, next go for secondary master with the dvd if that works then well the only dif would be the second ide device on seconday. If that didn't work have you checked and made sure that the drive detects correctly in the bios. Also if you have another mobo to test it with that would be best. Beyond that if you have any more details as to what happens it would be helpful, Hope this helps -Karl

Don Hewler, The device ACPI IRQ HOLDER FOR PCI IRQ STEERING is acuttly the device that allows your computer to share IRQ's between the cards most often you'll find that there is a IRQ steering attached to each irq. What exacly "conflict" wise is happening. Are you getting poor framrates. crashes. video anonymoulys <-- ohh I don't I didn't spell that right. What other cards do you have in the system? By default on most boards if you look in the manual it will show you which devices/slots share what. For example in Abit's BP6 PIC slot 3 shares with the Udma controler and Slot 0 shares with the AGP card. Hence wonderfull things happen if you use all the devices on the secondary controller and then put a nic in slot 3 that is also heavly used... Try checking your bios and see if it's set to plug and play os or not. Often I've found that bios's are better as assigning irq's then MS OS's but that's not always true. I would also update the ESCD something or other data, I'm to lazy to reboot and I can't remember the name of it... Hope this helps, -Karl

Well here's the story, First of all here are my system specs. Board: Abit KG7-R (761 north, 686B south) CPU: Amd 1.4Ghz Memory: (1) 256MB PC2100 Unregistered DIMM CD-ROM Drives: Secondary Master -- Acer 8X4X32 CD-RW Secondary Slave -- Pioneer 107S (7X DVD Slot) HDD: Primary Master -- Maxtor 30GB 7200RPM UATA 100 Primary Slave -- Empty (IBM 60GB 7200RPM on order) AGP: Geforce2mx W/TV-OUT PCI: Slot 0 -- Empty Slot 1 -- Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Slot 2 -- Empty Slot 3 -- Empty Slot 4 -- Linksys 100TX NIC Slot 5 -- Empty Raid: Enabled Floppy Drive: Disabled (floppy drive? we don't need no stinking floppy) OK so this is what is happening. I installed XP this morning. everything seamed to work great. I didn't install any drivers no proformance hits. About 12 hours in while talking in Bersirc I got a coredump. After re-start I noticed massive lag and audio skipping. I then looked at the Controler settings. My HDD was set to PIO I then looked at the CD-ROM's they were still UDMA. I downloaded all of the drivers from Abit, no improvement. I then thinking from past experince with the udma on the BP6 I disabled the Raid controller and everything went back to normal. I was planning on using the controller so if anyone has any idea of a trick so that I can re-enable it without going back to the dark ages in terms of HDD transfer it would be great! Thanks, -Karl

I have the same, a KG7-Raid with the 761 northbridge and 686B southbrige. When I first installed XP I had no problems, didn't need to install any drivers what so ever. After the first 12 hours of uptime the system did a coredump on me. After rebooting both of my HDD would detect in PIO mode. Lag city. The solution was to disable the raid controller. The last board I got from Abit (BP6) had the same problem with the secondary controller. Don't know what to tell ya there. All in all no need, you can download them from Abit but as far as I could tell each one said they were already up to date. I'd keep an eye out though they are bound to release new drivers soon. -Karl