Ok here's my problem. I recently bought a 250Gb Maxtor Sata Hard drive and installed it with no problems. But my last hard drive was an 80Gb Pata hard drive which i was planning on using to backup everything i had. So for some reason i had to unplug my 80Gig to get windows to install on my new hard drive, but then once windows was all set up i hooked up my 80gig again to get all my stuff back but it wouldn't work!! Sometimes it would say "New Hardware Detected" which was the hard drive, but it would not show up in 'My Computer'. I even went to device manager and it said there were no problems. Please help me!

you have to go to control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management. there you'll find your new harddrive, you'll have to initiate it or make it active or something like that, maybe you'll have to format it also

Didn't work

In you BIOS set your boot order.
All drives must be connected in order to set the sequence.

Cheers!

I would like to setup my PC to have both PATA and SATA drive.

I currently have a 40GB PATA drive and I am planning to buy a 120GB SATA drive.

How do I configure a SATA drive to be the primary drive and PATA be secondary? Won't there be any conflicts? Any advice will be greatly appreciated..

Below is my PC's specs

Athlon64 3000+ (Socket 754)
MSI K8N Neo Mobo
512 MB PC 400 RAM
128 MB Inno3D FX5500 128bit

40GB Seagate Hardrive (IDE O) Master
Lite-On DVD Rom (IDE 1) Master
Lite-On CDRW (IDE 1 ) Slave

Thanks in advance!

The way I have usually done it is to setup the SATA drive first with windows, then hook up the PATA drive. You can have both drives hooked up at the same time, you would just have to set the boot order in your BIOS.