MS Windows Home Server

This is driving me crazy- I have two old motherboards, both 4+ years old- and I cannot get either one to work as they both give an error saying no legitimate storage devices available.

What are modern motherboards that are guaranteed to work with whs? Please help - thank you.

Looking to put together a new system with AMD Phenom X4 AM+ motherboard. Looks like the choices for chipsets/SATA controllers are AMD/ATI and NVidia. Can somebody tell me what NOT to get for trouble-free support of optical drives?

The Nvidia controllers look to be offering 5-6 SATA ports, and some others offer 4 plus a secondary controller. the AMD/ATI controllers look to be mostly 4 ports plus secondary controllers.

I need as many SATA ports as I can get, no RAID, and support for at least 2 optical drives and 3-4 hard drives if possible. Will likely use IDE also. Preferring not to go to a PCI card. I'm assuming that most if not all of the secondary SATA controllers are non-friendly for optical drives.

I just put together an ASRock AM3 server for WHS, it will only be used for backups and occasional remote access.
I went with AHCI control, so I HAD to put in a floppy drive to load the driver (not savvy enough for splistreaming) LOL
Finally got it running after having password issues, they need to be the same (duh), and I needed to update the Nvidia graphics driver.
Here are the specs, basics

Cooler Master $40 case
AsRock A10N78M MB
Left over 400W PS
Left over 65W AMD 64 X2 5400+
Left over HS/fan for a 125w Phenom
2Gb DDRII 800 Kingston dual kit
Left over IDE DVD R/W drive
left over floppy drive
250Gb new Hitachi Deskstar SATAII
500Gb WD Blue Caviar SATAII

The problem is usually a lack of specific Server 2003 drivers, however I have found that more often than not if you use XP drivers in WHS, then the mother board will recognise all kinds of devices.

The last two boards I used didn't specifically support WHS/Serverr 2003, but the XP drivers came to the rescue both times.

Gary