HI all, Just wondering if i can run my SATA Hd as Master and then add 2 IDE drives as slaves? I am only running win XP Pro Sp3.

If you mean can you install Windows on your SATA drive and boot to it while using ANY other installed drives for storage then the answer is yes. You will need to select which hard drive will be the first drive to boot to. I recommend you disconnect the IDE drives temporarily while you install Windows to the SATA drive. After you get it booting to the SATA you can then reconnect the other hard drives. If you also have IDE optical drives you may need to temporarily change the jumper settings in order to boot to the WinXP CD.

Sata hard drives don't have master/slave designations and to have two ide hard drives on a single cable means that one of them must be a master, either jumpered to master/slave or cable select. The master / slave issue on ide drives is only so they can share a single cable/channel. Sata hard drive only have one cable per device so no drive, or every drive depending on how you look at it, is master. The only issue becomes which is disk 0, disk 1, disk 2.... but this is normally not configurable short of swaping the ports the drive is connected to. You can normally set the(or any in most cases) sata drive to be the boot device in bios, allowing it to boot to it without attempting to boot the ide disk.

just insert the sata cable in port 0! if u dont have port 0 use port 1! then make the sata drive priority first and u are ready

Thanks to all that left advice. It will all come in very handy