I have two SATA drives on my system, a 160g and a 320g. On my motherboard (DFI Infinity 975X/G)there are four SATA connection ports and these two drives occupy the bottom two slots. I was given a nifty little IDE to SATA converter and I thought it would be a good idea to use a 160g IDE drive I have and convert it to a SATA drive. From what I understood it was simply a matter of hooking the converter into the back of the IDE drive and plugging it into the No. 3 SATA slot and hey presto I would have another SATA drive. Not so! During boot-up the load screen got to "Detecting IDE Drives" and there it sat. It would not boot any further. I could not even use "Esc" to get into the BIOS during boot-up so there was no way I could get the BIOS to detect it. I noted earlier that my two optical drives occupy Channel 0 as master and slave. Channel 1 shows "None" Channel 2 shows one of my SATA drives Channel 3 shows the other SATA drive and Channel 4 shows "None." So I figured that if I set the BIOS before I installed the IDE/SATA drive it would be detected. So in Channel 1 I set "Detection" to Auto and "Access Mode" to LBA. Rebooted and total failure! How do I get the system to recognise the defacto SATA drive? All help will be appreciated. (I'm Australia based so my responses to any help will be delayed) Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!

Im sorry I can't help much but since no one else is, I will try my best My experience with those IDE to SATA converters is that they only sometimes work and when they do, you have to plug them into the harddrive firmly and make sure that you have power plugged into both the adapter and the harddrive and I think you have to also set the harddrive to master or single all I can say is check your wires, it sounds like the computer is detecting something... hope that helps

Thank you Nick... all help is appreciated. I'll have another go tonight and get back. Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!

The BIOS on your motherboard may not be set right. Some do not give you choices to configure the SATA drives. Also your motherboard may not recognize the converter. I have problems with my computers because certain SATA drives will not be detected at all (i.e. Seagate and some Western Digital). Hitachi seems to work fine. Also check your Jumpers on the drives. Some computers require them to be set to Cable Select such as Dell and some HP and Compaq computers (before and after the merger). Non related item. My companies biggest client is in Australia. Good Luck

Damn this is embarrassing... after all my checking and rechecking I forgot to attach the power cable to the drive. I attached the power cable to the card but not the drive. must be getting old. Thank you all for your suggestions particularly Nick who said "check your wires." I did. Regards. Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!

glad you got it working!

We've all or atleast most of us have done that before. I just did it two weeks ago, my boss just did it last week.