P5GD1 CD booting & linux followup

I had just decided it was impossible to boot from an internal CD drive that Linux would recognise, but for some reason I decided to try again.

There are many possible combinations of settings that can be tried with this mobo:

• Upper or lower IDE connectors
• Master or slave
• "Enhanced" or "Compatible" IDE mode
• "PATA+SATA", "SATA", and "PATA" modes
• ITE IDE controller "enabled" or "disabled", and if enabled, "quick" or "normal" detection mode

Assuming the distinction between "quick" and "normal" is irrelevant, that makes 48 ways you can set up a single drive on this motherboard, although 12 of those ways won't work at all (one of the IDE connectors is disabled when ITE is disabled.)

Well, I found a configuration that would let me install Kubuntu 5.10 on a "regular" IDE hard disk. I could not install Fedora Core 4 under the following configuration; a kernel panic occurs in FC4 during the kernel init process.

• IDE hard disk as primary master (attached to upper connector)
• CD/DVD drive as primary slave
• "Enhanced" mode, subtype "SATA"
• ITE can be enabled or disabled. If enabled, drives attached to the lower connector will work in Windows once a special driver is installed. However, as far as I can tell, Linux cannot use these "ITE" devices (lower connector) under any circumstances.
• Also, a SATA hard drive was attached, although this is probably irrelevant to whether it works or not.