controller card

[teamo1]

I have an old Dell XPS 500 Pentium III. I installed an IDE controller card to upgrade to a 250 GB hard drive. The card has two IDE slots for the ribbon cable. I know that the hard drive goes into one of them but should I also plug in my DVD RW into the other slot or should I leave that plugged into the motherboard. Thanks.

 

[Atomic Rooster]

Leave your DVD-RW right where it's at. No need to move it as it could cause more configuration problems for ya and you will see no improvement in performance.

 

[Remeniz]

It really doesn't matter.

Just don't plug in the CD drive as a secondary with the 250GB hard drive on the controller card.

I would plug the CD drive into the motherboard and use the IDE controller for another hard drive, or two.

 

[teamo1]

Thanks for the help. One more question if I may: I am cleaning this computer up and reformatting it. Do I need to do anything special with driver installation for the controller card during the XP install, or do I just format as usual with the new OS and then install the drivers after it is up and running?

 

[Atomic Rooster]

If the installation doesn't recognize the controller, you will probably need to install the drivers during installation. You will be prompted to install them early on by pressing F6 I believe.

 

[Remeniz]

Some of these cards have RAID options built in them too.

As your only connecting one IDE hard drive to the controller I gather your not using the RAID options, if there is any.

So you should be able to install the OS on the drive connected to the controller without installing the drivers during the OS install.

 

[teamo1]

I reformatted and the XP loaded okay. When I restarted it after install I got a message that there was a problem loading windows. I selected start windows normally under the options that it gave me. It just keeps rebooting. I tried to reformat again but I can't get the disc to run. I selected the cd drive as the first boot option and put the disc in. When I restart the computer it keeps going to the normal diagnostic page and then returns to the boot options page. I can't get the computer to start from the disc.

 

[nevermind1534]

Is the computer still detecting your CD drive?

 

[teamo1]

Do you mean detecting it in the bios menu? It shows up when I go to the bios screen.