Hi all, I have been spending the last 6 hours upgrading my system but now I am stuck with no idea on how to solve my problem. I have recently bought a new motherboard, it has one IDE plug and a few SATA plugs. I was naive and thought I could just use my IDE hard drive (with xp sp2 installed) with a SATA adaptor on a SATA plug on my mobo without having to do anything... (I really want to keep this hard drive as it is, so I don't want to reformat it) The hard drive was not detected by the BIOS, so I moved it temporarily to the IDE cable where it was not detected either. I then did a Windows repair, and the drive would boot into windows fine. Then I installed every drivers (especially the SATA drivers) from my Mobo's CD. Everything went fine so I thought now that I had installed all drivers the HDD would be detected on the SATA cable as well. So I tried and it is still not connected. I am now running out of ideas, could you guys help me ? My Mobo is an ASUS M2N32 Deluxe, and the hard drive is a Seagate 320GB. I have all latest update from SP2 on that drive as well. Thanks in advance.

When you did the repair you may have lost all the updates, including SP2. I don't know anything about IDE to SATA adapters but doing a Windows repair shouldn't be necessary for the BIOS to see the HDrive. Have you set the boot order correctly in the BIOS? Also you shouldn't need to install any SATA drivers as the BIOS on your MB should be able to configure it without. Are you watching the POST screens at startup for installed drives & RAM or just trying to boot to XP? What service pack is on the CD you used to repair the XP installation? For now I suggest you cable the Harddrive as Master on the IDE channel. Once you get things ironed out MAYBE you can use that adapter. Be sure to set the boot order correctly in the BIOS.

You must load the drivers for your mboard if the IDE drive has a Windows installation that was originally installed on another mboard, especially the main chipset drivers, after you have run a Repair Setup after Setup has finished so that Windows has the proper information about the mboard, including it's hard drive controllers. Your IDE drive that is using the SATA adapter must be jumpered appropriately to suit whatever SATA header you have it connected to (normally so that it is seen as master) and probably requires the SATA controller is set to ATA a.k.a. IDE or EIDE (compatable) mode. For more info see response 2 this recent thread: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... By the way, if you were trying to get your IDE drive to run faster than 133mb/sec burst speeds, it can't. It will only run as fast as its specs will let it, or 133mb/sec, max. Hard drives don't use burst speeds much of the time in any case.

"I was naive and thought I could just use my IDE hard drive (with xp sp2 installed) with a SATA adaptor on a SATA plug on my mobo without having to do anything..." And what made you think connecting your PATA........cough.......cough IDE HDD via a SATA adapter was better for you than just using the normal IDE connector? I think you are overly complicating a pretty simple situation - forget the SATA adapter & hook up the PATA HDD to your new motherboard the normal way. If you end up getting a SATA HDD in the future then use the SATA connector on the motherboard. You're messing with the wrong guy

Hi all and thanks for your answers. I need to use this drive in SATA because I only have one IDE on this Mobo and I don't want to put the OS drive with the CD/DVD drive. Also I have a second IDE drive that I want to use for Data storage. I actually solved my problem and you will all laugh. The adapter I am using is a cheap ebay chinese adapter that came with no instructions. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I might have plugged it wrong. The IDE plug being perfectly symmetrical on that adapter allow itself to be plugged two different ways... I had simply plugged it the wrong way... It is now working perfectly. I still think I was right to do a Windows repair on my IDE cable, because the two Mobo are radicaly different. (ATI vs Nvidia Chipset) Sorry for waisting your time and thank you for your help.