SATA drives showing on PATA boot screen

[Larry Alkoff]

On my Kubuntu computer with an Intel 945P Neo3 motherboard
my SATA drives show up on the boot screen as Primary Master, Pri Slave, 
Secondary Master and Sec Slave.

Is it normal for PATA drives to show up on the boot screen with such a 
designation?

I spent some time identifying which SATA plug was SDA1, SDA2, SDB1 and 
SDB2.  Should I have bothered?

Do the listed designations have anything at all to do with how they 
should be used?  For example, in a system with high traffic between two 
drives you would probably want to assign different Primary IDE channels 
to the two drives and put the CD-ROM on the least used Secondary channel.

IOW, is it ok to just plug in the SATA devices into any unused channel?

I've already seen how the BIOS controlls the boot drive sequence.

One other question.  How can I boot up SATA drives with an additional 
old PATA drive in the system?  The PATA seems to 'take over' and the 
system tries to boot with that and ignore the boot order?

Larry

-- 
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Linux