Installing IDE HDD with SATA

faded

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Apr 4, 2006
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I just tried to install my older 120gig seagate IDE drive as a slave with my sata drive as the main one, but for some reason its not detecting in the BIOS.
Any ideas?
 

Codesmith

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Jul 6, 2003
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PATA and SATA drives can't share a channel, so its impossible for one to be the master of the channel and the other to be the slave.

You can losely think of sharing a channel as equivalent to sharing a data cable.

Furthermore all current implementations of SATA have one drive per channel (cable), and SATA drives don't even possess jumpers for master slave settings.

1) Read the HD FAQs and find out what you don't understand about master/slave .

2) If you moved any jumpers on the SATA drive restore them to their orriginal position and never touch a jumper again unless you first read what each jumper does.

3) Set your IDE drive to Master. If there is another IDE device on the same chanel (same cable) then set it to Slave. If its the only drive on the channel some models require you use a Master No Slave / Single Jumper setting that must be used. Almost always there is a chart on the drive itself, but on rare occasions you will have to look up the settings online.

4) If your SATA drive doesn't show up, its possible that your controller require you to enter RAID setup and set the drive up as a Single Drive Array before it will show up.

5) If are installing XP to a the SATA drive its possible that you will need to press F6 and load the controller drivers from a floppy when prompted.

6) If your OS is on the IDE drive you may need to load the proper controller / chipset drivers before you can access the drive.

7) Boot priority needs to be set in the CMOS setup (BIOS). You need to make sure the drive with the OS boots before the drive without the OS.

Some very old and very stupid BIOS may not let you change the boot priority of your hard drives, but none of those machine have SATA ports.