The Asus P4P800-E Deluxe comes with a full set of cables to set up a PC, unless it's a refurbished board without the extras. Hard drives go to the Primary IDE Channel. It uses the Master-Slave set up, not computer select. The Secondary IDE Channel has the optical drives. It really makes no difference unless you intend running the CD and DVD drive simultaneously. Master has precedence over Slave, normally I'd suggest putting the DVD drive at Master. Some drives specify a position, that info is usually in the installation instructions. As I said though, it makes little difference.
As mentioned, uninstalling the IDE channel is the best way of getting the system back to DMA. You only need to uninstall the channel that is in PIO, one or both; if just the optical drive, the channel it's on, usually Secondary. A number of things can cause a system to go into PIO, the read problems mentioned, but also hardware problems. I just saw a person stuck in PIO due to a faulty cable going to the optical drives. Temporary problems that cause a system to revert to PIO can be remedied by the reset with uninstall from the Device Manager. Just be aware that sometimes there can be problems that have to be repaired before switching back to DMA can be accomplished. As long as a system has been working and no one has been tampering around inside the PC, most of the PIO problems are of the temporary type. So always do the check through device manager before going into more complicated troubleshooting.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 17. April 2006 @ 23:46
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