Hi. Maybe someone can help me out.
BACKGROUND: I bought a P4S533 with a P4 1.6A and Corsair XMS2700 memory. I installed the board, mem, CPU, and a WD1200JB hard drive as master on the primary IDE in an ANTEC SX630 case. I booted and everything worked fine, except no OS installed yet. I then installed a ATAPI Plextor 40/12/40A CDRW as master on the secondary IDE channel. Booted to see if the CDRW was recognized, BIOS found the WD1200JB on the primary IDE, but found nothing on the secondary IDE channel. Trying to figure out why, I moved the CDRW to the primary IDE as slave, booted, and the BIOS found both the hard drive and the CDRW on the primary during boot. That tells me the CDRW ATAPI code is compatible with the P4S533 at least for auto BIOS recognition. Thinking the cable could be the problem, I put a new cable in the secondary IDE channel and moved the CDRW back to the secondary IDE jumpered as master. Booted up: primary IDE hard drive found, no device found on secondary IDE. Hmmm. BTW the bios was configured for auto recognition for master/slave devices on both the primary and secondary IDE. I then played around with BIOS configuration to set the device forced as CD and had no success, the BIOS never saw a device on the secondary IDE.
To review:
1) The CDRW works, because it is recognized on the primary IDE.
2) Its probably not the cable, because two different cables
were used to test (actually 3, 2 40-pin and 1 80-pin).
My conclusion: The secondary IDE channel is bad. (Anybody know anything that makes that conclusion stupid?)
My action 1: RMAed it back to googlegear with "secondary IDE channel does not work" as the problem.
Googlegear response: They test it and say "Per our technician you need to install driver cd to make 2nd IDE channel to work".
My action 2: I looked in the ASUS on-line manual for the P4S533 and there is a "SiS BUS Master PCI IDE Driver". However, unless I am mistaken, this could only come into play after the BIOS device recognition sequence occurs and the OS boots and would have no effect on the discovery of the CDRW by the BIOS.
Googlegear is waiting for me to email them with my decision to return my money and call it quits (minus all the shipping costs I've paid) or let them ship the board back to me. I really want the P4S533, but don't want them to ship me back what I think is a bad one. I am trying to decide whether to argue with them or not, but want to get some opinions on the problem from people who have the P4S533. Any comments are appreciated, maybe I'm missing something obvious.
Also, I'm getting anxious to get my new system going and may just buy a motherboard locally. Any recommendations for alternate motherboards? I can't find a P4S533 locally here in Dallas.
Thanks.