Hi All I need some advice on a new hard drive. My mobo is this one I have my os installed on my old 30Gb IDE drive. Not ideal, but I am not going through the pain of a reinstall just yet. My question is: can I put a SATA hard drive and keep the old IDE drive as well? Is there anything I should worry about before trying something like this? Thanks as ever Tom

If your MBoard has support for SATA drives then you can. Be aware that there can be issues with HDs larger than 137GBs. Both the MBoard BIOS and the operating system MUST support 48 bit LBA. If you have an AMD 3400 processor then your BIOS should be OK. Winxp needs to be running at least SP1 in order to support 48 bit LBA. You may need to install SATA drivers and setup the new drive in the BIOS. Be sure to connect the SATA on the first SATA controller. Your MB may have 2 or more SATA controllers. Use the one with the lowest number assignment. It MAY be possible to clone your old drive directly to the new SATA if you would like to do that. If so, request more info on how to do that.

Brilliant and thorough answer - thanks very much indeed. (Certainly not over the hill) Will do exactly as you say. (Have considered cloning, but apparently because you install on one type, there is no performance benefit moving to the new type. Still - if I decide to do so I will post back in a new thread for assistance!) Many thanks again Tom