The Miracle of BIOS
Alright, I don't remember if I mentioned this in my previous post, but at one point, I decided to check some settings in BIOS - I believe it was just the power cycle statistics (specifically, my total uptime and the number of hard power-downs the system has done)... Well, while I was in there, I decided to test out an idea I had...

My motherboard has four SATA150 ports and 1 IDE port (which supports 2 devices). By default (and the recommended configuration in BIOS is to leave the system set to auto-detect which systems to enable:

• Just IDE
  
• Just SATA
  
• IDE + 2 SATA
  
• IDE + 4 SATA
  
• Auto - System detects what is in use and makes a selection based on the number of devices and what interface they are hooked to.

I don't understand why the system doesn't just load everything, I guess there may be a support issue... But it seems odd to me, especially with how much of a pain it's been... I'd reboot, and the system wouldn't see my SATA drive... Leaving me without any operating system to boot, since it would only see my DVD drive.

So, even though I only have one IDE and one SATA device, I decided to configure the system to be statically set to IDE + 4 SATA (Enhanced mode) - which simulates 6 IDE devices:
0 - Primary + Slave
1 - Primary + Slave ...

Once I did this change, Linux changed a bit... First, I said that it had detected a new IDE controller and a new SATA controller - I configured each to load at boot in initrd. Doing that may have been a bad idea. Now, my HDD activity light won't turn off... It's glowing yellow as soon as linux loads. The second thing I noticed was that my DVD RW drive changed from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda - notice that there is no number for the DVD RW this time around.

In Windows XP - the change was very transparent... When I booted, the system said that it had detected a new IDE controller and a new SATA controller and that was about it. Nothing else change in Windows. I guess that was a nice little thing that XP did for me... Even though I usually have severe problems in that operating system.

Side Note
Yesterday, while battling with Windows to install and then run the Sims 2 (with the University and Night Life expansion) was a chore - I prefer to run my games from images, but the damn thing wasn't letting me! But, I digress... While working between Windows XP (Suzi-XP) and Windows 2000 (Miki-ni) all of a sudden I lost my mouse. I was really quite annoyed with the operating system, but when switching to Miki-ni didn't fix the problem and a reboot didn't fix the problem - I decided to unhook my mouse and hook up my old Microsoft mouse - that worked instantly. Grrr, another mouse bites the dust. It's actually surprising, considering that I'm not all that hard on my mice/mouses.

However, the mouse I was using was just something that some roommate had left with my stuff ages ago and had just sat in my collection waiting for someone to claim it. The mouse was also cheap and off-brand - a KINO optical mouse. I've always prefered the more traditional mouse, but I must say that having an optical was kind of nice... I'm kind of going to miss that mouse... But, for now it's in my "To be tested" pile of mice - I'll eventually hook it into another computer directly to test it.