Dean's World

My motherboard crapped out on me. $420 later I pretty much have a new PC that's actually faster than the one that died.

My motherboard is about four years old. I bought it when I built my rig. It was socket 939 which, it would appear, no one carries retail any longer. Sure, I could have paid $50 and got one online but, I supposed, it was time to upgrade. I knew that with a new board I'd need a new processor. NO big deal. Now I'm kicking it with an AMD 2.1 GHz dual core. I didn't anticipate having to buy new memory (2GB DDR2 down from my old 4GB DDR). Oh, and a new power supply. Apparently a 20 pin plug into your motherboard isn't as good as a 24 pin. So, now I have a new 550 watt power supply that's not as kewl as my old one because that one was internally lit - I have a window on the side of my tower. All my fans are LED lit as well. I still need to get some neon in there too.

So, motherboard dies, I need to get new motherboard, processor, RAM, and power supply.

The board is SATA but has one IDE chain. It didn't occur to me until I got home and installed it that I needed two (I'm not buying new SATA hard drives). Off to Newegg.com to order a PCI card that'll give me an additional IDE chain. So, no DVD- or CD-ROM support until Thursday. And wouldn't you know it? It appears AGP has gone bye-bye. So, my old video card is useless. Newegg.com again for a new PCI Express video card.

The lesson here?

Never get off the technology train. Ever. Replace one part with something newer and you gotta redo the whole stinking thing.

Okay, you all know I pretty much had to build a new PC recently. But now I have a problem. As I stated earlier my new motherboard is SATA and I don't want to buy a SATA hard drive. The motherboard only has one IDE chain and I need two for both hard drive and DVD-ROM support (I have two of each device).

I purchased a PCI card that provided me with a second IDE chain that my PC sees as a RAID controller. You can look at the card here.

Question:

Is there a way I can have my hard drives plugged into IDE1 and my DVD-ROMs plugged into the PCI card? Or even the other way around but still boot from the master hard drive?

Because, right now, if I plug the DVD-ROMs into the card my PC doesn't boot. If I remove them the PC boots just fine. If I plug the hard drives into the PCI card my PC prompts me to insert a boot disk.

Any help would be appreciated.

BTW: I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate. If that helps at all.