I only have basic knowledge but still went AHEAD and built a computer.

It SURPRISINGLY turned out well except, there's only one IDE on this motherboard I got( Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR ) so I can only connect the hard drive to it.

I tried looking around and found that I could connect one "master" and one "slave" to one IDE(correct me if I'm wrong) so I tried connecting the blue end to motherboard, black end to HD, and grey end to the CD ROM(grey is supposedly the slave) and went to BIOS to try and configure them as such. However, it turns out that when I did that, the computer fails to detect the very presence of HD and sets CD ROM as the master and no other hardwares present.

To simplify, I'm wondering how one is supposed to connect a HD and CD drive to a motherboard with only one IDE, namely the one named above(Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR).


TY in advance.How old is the mobo? I didnt know they still used IDE for HDD. Are you sure there are no SATA connections for the hard drive?you'll need to change the jumper settings on the CD-ROM and Hard drive to reflect which one is slave.

it actually doesn't matter which one is where on teh cable- what matters is the jumper assignments.The mobo is relatively new release as far as I'm informed ( <1 yr? )

The HDD, on the other hand, is 5 yrs old. the HDD is the only part I wanted to keep because I wanted to preserve the things I "built" on it over the course of five years. There doesn't seem to be any SATA connections for the HDD or CDD ( I don't even know what SATA connection is, but after typing it in in yahoo, my PSU appears to have some connectors but don't think HDD or CDD has any SATA )

So is there no way at all to connect HDD and CDD to one IDE After frantically trying to come up with a solution, all I could find on the mobo manual is that the IDE on the mobo supports up to two IDE devices. I was excited when I read this and did the black on HDD grey on CDD but as explained in OP, it only recognizes the CDD when I did that and when booted, it asks for system disk Quote from: BC_Programmer on June 17, 2009, 10:16:20 PM

you'll need to change the jumper settings on the CD-ROM and Hard drive to reflect which one is slave.

it actually doesn't matter which one is where on teh cable- what matters is the jumper assignments.