Fixing the tech... Swapping out a bad motherboard only to find the new one doesn't support legacy drives.

So my Windows 7 system at home is a fairly basic box. I did however swipe the internal DVD drive for use in my SFF CentOS 6.x iSCSI target ssytem. Right now I don't recall why I needed SATA there, but I digress...

So the internal DVD RW in this system is a fairly old, but lightly used PATA DVD+-RW drive. No big deal, all motherboards still have at least one legacy PATA controller onboard right?

Bad assumption. And the worst part is, I already have boxes with these exact motherboards in production that I built. I should KNOW what is on these boards!

But now I am a bit of a dilema. I still use the DVD a lot for burning iso images and such, not to mention loading the new mainboard drivers / video drivers etc...

So I need to either swap out the DVD drive with a new SATA drive, or I need to swap in a PATA controller.

Good thing I have a pile of old legacy hardware that should be compatible, because I am not a huge fan of any of the drives that Frys currently offers, and I don't want to wait for Newegg, Amazon, or any of them to ship...

So tonight comes the operation. Dig for the controller in my long retired AMD Athlon 1400 box that used to run Mandrake Linux. Yeah Mandrake. It hasn't been used in THAT long..., and swap the controller in. It is a HighPoint RocketRAID 404 card. A RAID controller sure, but I know that it can be used for single optical disks as well. I have used it before with IDE DVD drives... so it should be fine...

The worst part is, this whole motherboard swap might have been for no good reason at all. I was having some thermal shutdown / video RAM artifact problems with the prior board, that had integrated video. I ordered the board, and when I pulled the side of the case off, which I had somehow though I had done prior but obviously not, I found some seriously nasty dust / cat hair literally clogging the CPU cooler and the heat sink on the video chip... Some gentle persuasion out in the shop with that freshly installed air hose reel, and my old blow gun would have taken care of this in short order, but it was already too late, I had begun the work...

The good thing here is that I now have a free board that I simply need matching memory, CPU, and power supply for, and I can give my CentOS iSCSI target host a serious upgrade...