[AlanKemp]

I recently bought an NVidia 8800 graphics card, and had to also get a new motherboard to support it. When I installed the graphics card it is so big that it covered up the single ide port, so I can't connect my dvd drive (HD's are all SATA). I bought a PCI card that has both a SATA and a PATA port, but with the DVD connected to that its not showing up as a boot device in the bios.

Next I bought a small adapter that fits directly into the back of the drive and gives it a SATA connector. With that fitted it shows up in the bios as the IDE channel 2 master device (gets the device manufacturer/name correct, so the adapter works to some extent).

However, it just will not boot from a cd. It gives me a "Boot from cd:" prompt, spins up the disk (if there is one) but then just freezes. This is with or without a cd in the drive, and I've tried a couple of different boot cds which I know work (I've tested them again on another machine, windows and linux disks). I was originally warned that these pata/sata adapters were "only" for hard drives, but the box that this one came in specifically mentions using it for cd/dvd drives.

Any ideas?

 

[ebackhus]

I don't have much experience with IDE->SATA adapters, but the ones I have seen work exclusively with hard drives.How much clearance is there between the IDE slot on the board and the 8800? Even < 1/2" is enough to fit in an IDE cable with room to spare.

 

[AlanKemp]

One of the graphics card capacitors is actually touching the top of the ide socket :-(

I've just ordered a sata dvd writer to replace the other one. Hope this works...

Alan

 

[kodi]

I may be wrong ,if I am someone please correct me,but I don't think you can boot from an optical device connected to a PCI card as there is no power there till the Operating System is active

 

[AlanKemp]

I may be wrong ,if I am someone please correct me,but I don't think you can boot from an optical device connected to a PCI card as there is no power there till the Operating System is active

It did sort of work, the drive had power (I could open/close the draw). Also the PCI card printed a banner directly after the bios, so it was being initialized.

 

[Done_Fishin]

have you got SATA enabled in BIOS ?
Can you go through an "other removeable devices" configuration in BIOS to access the drive?
Like wise I have no experience of these cards, but do remember my BIOS having an option to boot from other removeable devices.