Hello! So, i've been slowly updating my computer as i go along, with new pieces of hardware. It reached the point where i felt my hard drive was bottle necking the rest of the system (it was an old hard drive 40GB, definatly not SATA), so i bought a 320GB SATA 150 hardrive. My aim was to install the new hard drive with my OS, and temporarily keep the old hard drive there as a slave, so that i could move all my old files over before taking it out. I've had a few problems. At first i couldn't even get the new hard drive recognised by the computer either on startup or in the BIOS. Eventually i figured out that i had to enable the SATA option in BIOS. However, on boot up, it calls it "IDE MASTER - name of hardrive" - is this correct considering it is a SATA drive, or is my computer confused as to what kind of drive it is? Another thing i want to ask, is that i've read in places online, that you have to install SATA drivers, while formatting the harddrive, however i never did this, but the drive is still working (i'm connected to the internet through it now), albeit is only regestering as 298GB in "my computer" - is this normal? HAve i gone wrong by not going out of my way to install SATA drivers? A final question, and this is the one which i really can't get my head around, i can't get my computer to recognise my old hardrive at all. It's got an OS installed on it, but that shouldn't stop it being able ot work as a slave drive, right? I've changed the jumpers around accodingly, but it just won't appear in the bios or at startup anymore. Being the only old drive (what's the term?) connected, surely all i should have to do is plug it all in, set the jumpers, set it as slave in BIOS, and away i go? So a summary of questions - *On start up it calls my new SATA drive the IDE master. is this right? *I was never aware i installed SATA drivers, but it's working anyway, is this ok? *Is there any help available on why it won't let my old hard drive, still full of data and an OS run as a slave to my new SATA hard drive? Sorry for the lengthy post, trying to sort this out has stolen my whole day, and i've made little progress. Thanks for any help you guys can give!

Did you install an OS on your new HDD?

Yes i did, WINXP. I'm using the new hardrive and operating system to connect to the internet and this forum right now. Does that cause a problem?

What MOBO do you have?

You may not have needed to slave your old drive and that may be why you cannot read it.As it was running, you didn't need to change anyting because if it is alone on an ide cable, that should be set as "master 1 drive". Some motherboards have the drivers in already for sata as does SP2 XP version as well so if it is working, don't worry about it.

Ah great, that's some comforting information. I'll try and make the old hard drive a master drive and see if that helps it work in conjunction with the SATA drive. Out of curiousity, how will the computer know which drive to boot from out of the SATA and the old drive, if the old drive is set to master? Will it default to the SATA drive? Badboy - my motherboard is a gigabyte 2004GT edition GA - 8IPE1000-G is that the right info? It says on the box that is supports SATA. Thanks for the help so far!

"Out of curiousity, how will the computer know which drive to boot from out of the SATA and the old drive, if the old drive is set to master?" You should have an option to choose in BIOS which drive is the boot drive (or first boot drive). If yours mainboard doesn't have that option, i think typically, it is the default setting to have SATA0 as first boot drive.