CD & DVD devices on the same motherboard

[I_Dzhugashvili]

Hello everyone! I am hoping someone will be able to answer my question.
I built a machine on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe Rev 2 Ultra 400 board about 14 months ago. It is a pretty decent system except for one particular problem that I experienced. I just could not seem to use an LG GDR-8161B Combo Drive and an LG 52x24x52 burner in the box without having severe problems. I.e. Windows XP would sometimes find only ONE drive, or sometime would find THREE drives.
Someone told me that certain dvd devices can not share in IDE port with anything else; is this true? I am building a machine for my girlfriend and before I get another Nforce2 board, I am wondering if someone knows if this is true, or if the problem is something else entirely.

Any advice or information will be greatly appreciated; thank you in advance!

[Bhairav]

Mr Stalin (:wink:), I'd recommend you remove NVidia's IDE drivers, and use MS IDE default drivers and check. NV's IDE drivers are flaky, to say the least.

[I_Dzhugashvili]

Oh no no no! That was a DIFFERENT I. Dzhugashvili!

Seriously, thank you for the quick response. But here is the problem. I had my problems well over a year ago, and so I can not be sure, but I seem to think that I had this problem with devices not showing up and with extra devices showing up, even when I had the out-of-the-box XP IDE drivers, and not only with the Nvidia SW drivers. But I can't be sure because it was so long ago. Is it possible that there is a "peculiarity" with either the motherboard, or the chipset, or with that DVD combo drive, or with all such combo drives?

[rdgrimes]

Sounds like a software/driver issue to me. The board has no particular problem with running optical drives. I ran 4 of them on mine until it did a melt-down for unknown reasons. That was the last Asus product I will ever buy. Easiest way to tell is to see if the drives always show up right at POST, if so then it's not a hardware issue.

[I_Dzhugashvili]

Okay, okay! I came here for some information and have had the luck to get two answers from people who have been on this forum for a long time with many posts to their credit. What more could I ask for, really?
Thank you both for responding, I greatly appreciate it!

[rugger]

Yep, don't use nvidia's ide drivers .....