motherboard to support Core2duo, and run a IDE hard drive :o

Most newer mobos have just 1 x IDE slot. That should not present a problem, as you can put your HDD and CDRW on the same ribbon cable, as Master and Slave.  

Yes, and both drives will not run slower because they are on the same channel.

Some people report slower operation, which should not be the case.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProdu...

At the moment I'm always looking for a Core 2 capable motherboard which acknowledges that a lot of us still have a few (see my sig :roll  PATA hard drives. But honestly, doing so because you don't want to mess with SATA certainly strikes me as ... well ... a less special reason.

There really is no reason to avoid SATA and many reasons to embrace it. You plug the cables in. You use it. That's pretty much it. No master/slave/cable select jumpers to worry about. No struggling with bulky cables. And much better airflow due to the skinny cables.

As already pointed out, you can attach your PATA hard drive and optical drive to the same PATA cable so you should be able to get by with a single PATA socket on the motherboard. But if you are willing to spend (possibly waste) $14 to try something that may not work, you can also try this PATA to SATA converter dongle. It allows you to use a PATA drive with one of the SATA sockets on a motherboard. You plug it into the PATA hard drive and then plug a SATA cable into the converter.

I've had good luck with this converter with a hard drive. Bad luck (repeated windows XP system error events) with a DVD drive. It's something I definitely intend to explore further sometime after Jan 21 when I expect to finally get around to buying a motherboard that supports SATA. (Oh, and Core 2 too :wink .

-john, the redundant legacy PATA dinosaur

I had your problem, i ordered a new HDD W/O knowing it was an IDE

Needless to say it was VERY hard to get the cable to both the CD-ROM and HDD on one cable.

I dont think any newer mobo's even support 2 IDE's

Correction

http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-VSTA.htm

the Asrock 775 VSTA does and C2D also and has a PCI-E and AGP slot.
O, and the GFX supported list, it supports yours.


http://www.asrock.com/support/VGA/show.asp?Model=775Dua...

You should find 2 PATA connectors (4x devices) also on any motherboard that uses NVIDIA's 650i chipset. At this moment only one is available, the ASUS P5N-E SLI, but more should be showing up during the rest of this month and the next.

-john

Oh, goodness gracious.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

There's nothing to learn. SATA is simpler than IDE. No master/slave, no low-level formatting, no RLL to worry about.

Each drive has two cables: the big one is power, the little one is data. You plug one drive into one port. You can boot off of any drive, you can mix different speeds.

SATA is drive interconnection for the brain-dead.

I have a 250GB SATA hard drive lieing around, so mi might try that and then if not just use my old IDE. Anyway thanks for all your help, much appreciated.

Also its not the fact that i think sATA is complicated, its just i have always used IDE. I guess you could say scared of a change.

:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
250GB? And SATA? Just lying around???
:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:

Sounds like it would be fun to go on a scavenger hunt at your house. :wink:

-john, the rendant legacy dinosaur