IDE cable and SmartCheck

Previously I asked these questions on the MSI (Motherboard) forum and I would like to get a second opinion.
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1. I notice that when I installed the MB/CPU/Memory I now have the two HD's on Secondary Master and Secondary Slave, while the CD burner/DVD burners are on the Primary Master and Primary Slave (IDE slots). Every thing runs ok, but should I switch the cables at the MB connector? If so will there be anything else I need to change?
2. I set BIOS to enable S.M.A.R.T. but when I run SmartCheck in System Suite 5 only the Primary responds to the check. The secondary says it is not capable. With the old MB they both responded to Smartcheck and always returned a status report of ok. Is there something else I need to set in BIOS?
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I was told to put one HD and one optical drive as primary and secondary on the Primary IDE and the other two devices as primary and secondary on the other IDE cable. This change might return my HD's S.M.A.R.T. back to normal. I was also told that I should edit my Boot.INI file or else Windows might not boot. Could I get other opinions on these please?

 

It's usually a good idea to have your harddrives on the primary IDE channel. Yuo won't have to do anything but switch the IDE cable at the MB end. S.M.A.R.T. will probably work then. If not, double check the jumpers for your harddrives. S.M.A.R.T. isn't much of a big deal and actually causes a small performance drop - I stopped using it. So its not an essential thing by any means either way.

Having both harddrives set as the master on each IDE channel as you described with the CD/DVD burners as slaves might work as well. You might run into some problems doing direct copies changing the IDE setup so much, though. So be sure to re-test CD burning once everything is setup how you want it.

Good luck!

 

For WarC:
Thank you, that is pretty much my opinion. Not too sure about the "edit the boot.ini" part however. Not sure why I would be advised to do that.
BTW: the reason I asked about the S.M.A.R.T. was because as I boot up, I got a little blurb about it being disabled. I went into BIOS and enabled it. I just hated seeing that "capable but not enabled" remark as it booted.
If anyone has opinions concerning the editing of the boot.ini file, I would like to hear them also.