XP won't recognize >4 ATAPI CDRW

[Petz]

Am building a CD Burner tower with (hopefully) 6 ATAPI CD
and DVD Burners. Motherboard has 4 SATA ports and 3 of the
CDRW's are attached to it using SATA to ATA adapters. Call
these E,F,G. 3 are attached to the IDE ports (H,I,J). The
SATA hard drive is on the 1st SATA port (partionions C and
D)

No matter what I do, XP won't recognize more than 4 of the
CDRW. If the IDE cables are unplugged, all 3 CDRWs
attached to the SATA ports are assigned drive letters and
work. If the IDE cables are reattached, only one of the
SATA-connected drives is visible.

What's going on here? Is there some kind of limit to the
number of ATAPI devices, either in the BIOS or in Windows?

Its a DFI NFII Ultra Infinity motherboard.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

SATA ports are designed to support hard drives,
not CD/DVD burners. Your motherboard is designed
to support four (4) SATA hard drives and four (4)
IDE devices. Using SATA to ATA adapters to install
your multitude of CD/DVD burners is beyond the
supported design parameters of your motherboard.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User

Be Smart! Protect your PC!
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


| Am building a CD Burner tower with (hopefully) 6 ATAPI CD
| and DVD Burners. Motherboard has 4 SATA ports and 3 of the
| CDRW's are attached to it using SATA to ATA adapters. Call
| these E,F,G. 3 are attached to the IDE ports (H,I,J). The
| SATA hard drive is on the 1st SATA port (partionions C and
| D)
|
| No matter what I do, XP won't recognize more than 4 of the
| CDRW. If the IDE cables are unplugged, all 3 CDRWs
| attached to the SATA ports are assigned drive letters and
| work. If the IDE cables are reattached, only one of the
| SATA-connected drives is visible.
|
| What's going on here? Is there some kind of limit to the
| number of ATAPI devices, either in the BIOS or in Windows?
|
| Its a DFI NFII Ultra Infinity motherboard.

 

[Petz]

Sorry this is split across 2 newsgroups, but you brought up
a new point in this reply. I've already successfully built
a 4xCDRW burner. It used WIndows 2000. Did Windows retrogress?

The 4-CD system used has 2 CDRWs on 2 SATA ports using
adaptors, hard drive and 1 CDRW on primary IDE controller,
and 1 CDRW on secondary IDE controller. It can burn 4 audio
CDs simulataneously in 2 minutes using Nero 6.

Also, on the current system, I couldn't get >4 to work
using an ATA/100 IDE controller, so I don't think the
problem is the SATA adaptors.

Here's a clue - with hard drive connected to SATA port 0,
SOny CDRWs on SATA ports 1 and 2, and 3 other CDRWs on the
IDE cables, the SATA BIOS only reports the hard disk and
ONE of the CDRW disks ("Sony CRX23"). So maybe that
indicates that the problem is in the motherboard BIOS
rather than WIndows, though it does POST just fine.

 

[Bob Harris]

It seems like a waste of the SATA contollers to use them on a device as slow
as a CD or DVD writer, assuming that they will even work for this purpose.
Instead, try an ATA/100 PCI adapter card. These are getting pretty cheap
usually contain two controllers, which can handle two IDE or ATAPI devices
each.

 

[Petz]

Yea, I tried two ATA/100 controller cards - one said it
didn't support ATAPI devices (like CDROM) so I just
returned it. With the other one I again couldn't get past 4
drives no matter what. Also, while you can put two drives
on each IDE cable, in reality the cable only talks to the
drives on each cable one at a time.

 

[Jerry]

Not necessarily true. I have a friend that has a Promise card that runs hard
drives ok but refuses to recognize CD ROM devices at all. The literature
states for hard drives - not CDs. etc.

Also, I have an ABIT IC7-MAX3 with 6 SATA connectors and 2 IDE connectors (4
devices) and the ABIT literature says I could use their SERILLEL2 ATA to
SATA adapter and run DVDs, CDs etc from the SATA ports with no problem .

Making uneducated comments can lead to trouble.

 

[Petz]

I burned the latest BIOS for the DFI motherboard, changed
the boot order so that SCSI was listed instead of IDE0,
removed "boot other devices" and now all 6 drives are
detected. The problem actually may have been the boot
order. "Try other devices" apparently doesn't check any
more devices after its failed 4 or so, and since I had
CDROM listed first, it gave up before trying SCSI, which
is what it thinks the SATA drives are. It will not try to
boot from SATA unless SCSI is explicitly named in the
boot order OR if less than 4 devices have failed to boot.

Got that?

Whew! Makes perfect sense to me.... NOT