Noobie Alert! Very little experience working on mobo's but have messed with memory and expansion cards enough to know what they do. Been with Windows since the days of dos and IBM xt's.

Ive got an older PC using an asus a7v mobo. It offeres an ide connection and an ata100 connection. Im only using the ide connections, with a master 40 g hd on the primary and a dvd rom device on the secondary master.

Ive never used ata100 before. Can I use my regular IDE disks and cd/dvds on it? Connectors look similar (but I really didnt do a one for one comparison)

Srtange thing about this ide connection.....it wont allow me to add a 100G drive to the primary chain (as a slave device)...wont pass post. Im thinking that maybe I could use the ata100 chain????? Or maybe I can use the ata chains in addition to the ide chains and still boot off the 40 G primary master drive?

ATA 100/133 are 80ribbon connectors,standard IDE is only 40 ribbon connector always put your hdds on the 80 and your cd/dvd on the 40,,you can tell the difference in the ribbon cables 'cause the eighty is finer than the 40 and is usually the blue connector on the mobo,ok??..>

Just use 80-wire cables for everything, even the optical drives. On your MB, the "IDE" connectors are really ATA-66 connectors, and thus also require 80-wire cables to work at full speed, just as do the ATA-100 connectors. Some drives have 3 types of jumper settings: master, slave, and "single-drive", so make sure they are set correctly for each drive.