Old 250g IDE and SSD 32g. Windows on SSD.

[zachboss]

I am about to upgrade my machine which has 1 hard drive on it that is 250g IDE which has my Windows Vista 32 bit on it. I want to buy a new motherboard that will support a IDE and SSD. 1st, are there motherboards that even do this. I have tried to look this up but I do not know enough about the items I am looking at. If not are there maybe connectors which will allow that?

If any of that is possible...can I buy a SSD and but Win7 64 on the SSD even though I already have Vista 32 on my IDE? What do I do with my old vista image? Do I need to erase it somehow?

 

[shamanxia]

First off, what do you want to upgrade to?

There are some 775 Motherboard for Intel Core 2's that have SATA and IDE ports but their isn't a lot of choice out there. Like MSI G31TM-P21. But all this really depends on what you are looking to upgrade to.

2nd. There are IDE to SATA converters (http://www.addonics.com/products/io/ide_sata.asp) So you can use both drives if you really want to.

3rd, Depending on which hard drive you connect to your first SATA port your drive will boot that hard drive. (you can also adjust this in most BIOS settings)

 

[jprahman]

By IDE are you referring to the ribbon connector, rather than the SATA cable that only has a few pins?

There are motherboards out there that support both IDE ribbon connectors, and the modern SATA II 3.0Gbps connectors that SSDs use. Newegg has plenty of them, just use the advanced search feature in the motherboards section and select PATA: 1 X ATA133 (2 devices) option.

As to the Vista boot image you could reformat the hard drive erasing the image in the process. You could also buy a new storage drive for the new motherboard, and put the IDE drive into another PC so that you could have two PCs and not waste the Vista install.

 

[zachboss]

Sorry for the super long delay. I eventually decided to buy a new PC with 2 Sata inputs for drives. I have a 750g Sata drive that has everything on it right now. I bought a Intel X25 Sata SSD 40gb. I installed it step by steb via Intels online guide. It shows up in my bios and on my device manager. Windows 7 says everything is working fine and all firmware and drivers are up to date but yet I can not get it to show up on "My Computer". Am I missing a step?

 

[jprahman]

You need to go into disk management and format and partition the drive in order for My Computer to recognize it as a usable drive. Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage should be where you need to go. That's where Vista's disk management is located and Windows 7 shouldn't be much different.

 

[zachboss]

You need to go into disk management and format and partition the drive in order for My Computer to recognize it as a usable drive. Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage should be where you need to go. That's where Vista's disk management is located and Windows 7 shouldn't be much different.

Hey man thank you so much for your help. I did exactly what you said and it worked perfect. Thank you thank you thank you. I was so upset about wasting my money. Nowhere online from intel did it say to do that.

 

[jprahman]

No problem. So what are you going to use the SSD for; applications?

 

[zachboss]

No problem. So what are you going to use the SSD for; applications?

Right now I am going to be putting Rift on it, a new mmo, and my League of Legends game on it. If I save up some cash I may buy Ghost and move my OS over so that it runs fast. Just a little something extra to make it less slow.

 

[jprahman]

Sounds good, enjoy it. SSDs can really make things feel a lot snappier. Your level load times should be slashed by the SSD.