EP45-UD3P IDE problem

[drsteve]

Hi Guys and Girls,

I wonder if any of you can help me as I am totally stumped. For some reason my motherboard (EP45-UD3P) will not recognise either of my two DVD drives in the bios. The drives are both connected via IDE and work perfectly in Windows Vista, for reading and writing, so there is no problem with the drives. However I want to install windows 7, but when I set the bios to boot from cd, it just boots staright from the hard disk. When I actually look in the bios, the drives don't even appear there. Even when I unplug all my SATA hard disks, it still wont boot from the DVD, just tells me to insert system disk.

Please help, as I am going to smash my computer to bits soon.
Thanks
Steve

[oggmonster]

Have you tried just plugging 1 IDE drive at a time? Are they set the 'master' and 'slave' ?

[drsteve]

Thanks for the quick reply ogg monster,

I haven't tried exactly that as I didn't want to bother taking them out. What I did was unplug the power from one of them, but left the IDE cable in both. As for the slave master, I am not sure, but I did move the jumper to all three positions in one drive, so I guess one of them must have been master, but still it didn't work. If you think totally unplugging one will help and setting to master (right?) they I will start unscrewing. Do you think this is likely to make a difference?

Cheers

[oggmonster]

I have seen it before where one of the optical drives is faulty and uplugging the power cable but leaving the IDE cable in has caused a problem. You shouldn't have to take everything out of your case just to unplug the IDE cable?  Unless you have a very small case ofc.
When you have only 1 optical drive plugged in, make sure its set on master or possibly even cable select.
Failing that SATA DVDRW drives are dead cheap these days..

Oh also a BIOS upgrade to the F9 BIOS may also help

[drsteve]

Okay Cheers, I am doing it now, will let you know in a few minutes if it makes any difference.

Cheers

[drsteve]

No it is still not seen by the bios (it should appear in the bios right?), even with only one and set to either master or cable select. Any other ideas?

[oggmonster]

You done that with both drives? On the IDE settings which should be auto, you may have to hit enter for it to refresh itself and detect the drive. Also upgrading to F9 BIOS may help.

[drsteve]

Thanks anyway, i tried that with both drives and another one from a different computer, but no look. Just seems that it doesn't want to play with IDE drives for some wierd reason. I am on the F7 bios, and am reluctant to change it, as it took me so long to get my system stable and nicely overclocked. I think I will take the easy option and just buy a SATA dvd drive, but it seems a bit crap that something so simple can't be done on this board.

Thanks for the suggestions ogg
Cheers

[oggmonster]

The F9 BIOS works great for me in terms of overclocking, see here http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,615.0.html

You could saving your BIOS profile then try loading optimised/fail safe defaults