help installing my new mother board

hello i need help installing my new mother board i bought a new amd 780g black series motherboard with a phenom x4 quad core and i have an ide hardrive and i was wondering if i could put the hard drive and the dvd with the same ide cable is beacause it only has one ide????if i plug it in all of it except the dvd do you guys think it should work or do you guys think that i should do something before i start using it or do i need to do something to the bios? oh and it came with a cd the Motherboard help please

You can put the Hard drive and dvd Drive on the same cable. There are jumper pins on the drives to make one the master and the other the slave.

As for the CD that came with the board, chances are it is at least 98% full of stuff to use with/for a Windoze OS. BUT, that said, do browse it thoroughly anyhow, looking into every folder on it, because sometimes there are little linux things, like maybe a driver for something (like a NIC) or a text file pointing you to some website for some information about using the hardware with Linux.

FWIW, I have a pretty good stack of CDs and DVDs here that came with various pieces of hardware and peripherals, and probably have made any use at all of less than 1% of the contents of everything on them all.

Have fun, congrats on the new board

Sasha

Just in case...

The motherboard may be limited to one IDE controller, but if you need more, I would recommend a controller card. Promise cards are generally well supported, although other makes may suit linux as well. You might find one used or at a cheap price, and it would give a bit more flexibility with connecting your devices.

As an example, a Promise TX2 Ultra133 has has two controllers giving four connections at a standard of Ultra DMA133.

thanks a lot for the help another questions is if i connect the hard drive and the dvd drive together which one should be the slace????

You don't need the cd. I setup an AM955/Gigabyte 790X computer over the weekend. Just pulled my drive out of the older computer and popped it in. Everything works out of the box only I had to flash BIOS because Cpufreq complained about not being able to recognize the new CPU so it would run at 800Mhz instead of 3200Mhz. You may wish to prepare a BIOS floppy/USB stick before you swap out your hard drive. That could save you some frustration.

Yep, that Promise controller works fine, I still have one of those lying around here. You could also get PATA to SATA converters. Although, obviously, you should go SATA only for any new hardware you buy from now on. I am certainly glad to be rid of the ugly old PATA cables. Makes for better air flow inside the case, too.

If you connect optical and hard drive, make hard drive master or choose Cable Select. Bear in mind that you choice dicates which cable connector goes into which drive (if you choose Cable Select, it does not matter).

The usual...

The standard arrangement is to have the HDD as Master and the CD/DVD as Slave, but if your cable doesn't reach you can either try to get an extra long cable or reverse the order. The standard cable length is 18", but there are longer. You will want an 80-wire cable. You might google for any problems if the order is reversed to CD/DVD as Master and HDD as Slave.

Just remember to set the jumpers. Your motherboard BIOS may have a procedure for finding and configuring the HDD that must be completed before it all works. Your motherboard manual will give you more information.

About controller cards: some have trouble finding CD/DVD devices. When I used my Promise, I reserved the on-board controller for the CD/DVD drives.

Luck