My Dell came with a 40gb Western Digital SATA drive and I want to install a new 250gb Maxtor ATA drive as a slave. Since they run on different cables how would I set them since they are jumper reliant. The SATA drive will stay as the Primary Master. The only IDE slot on the computer now runs the DVD RW drive, so I don't know if the 250gb would be primary master on the IDE channel and the DVD the primary slave. How will this work since the BIOS won't recognize 2 primary drives? I am just used to how my older computer worked with all IDE slots. Not sure how to run an SATA AND IDE drive together. Help would be appreciated.

If you open the case you might void the warranty, but that being said, there should be two ata controllers. You could use one for the dvd and the other for the new drive. Your sata controllers are separate. Just attach the new drive to another cable and boot. You might have to buy a new cable, and detect the device in the BIOS.

I have a new ATA cable, and the mother board only has 1-IDE controller which I would have to split between the 2nd hard drive and the DVD burner. Still my question is how can there be two master drives on the system? The BIOS will probably only recognize the SATA as the master as that takes precedence. Even if I format the ATA drive without the SATA drive installed, how do you configure the ATA drive as a slave to the SATA drive?

There is no Master/ slave with SATA. All drives are on a channel by themselves. As KJM has stated the IDE controller is totally separate from the SATA. Unless you intend to install an operating system on the second IDE drive I would recommend that you jumper the DVDRW as Master on the IDE controller and the harddrive as the slave. You BIOS boot order is already set to boot to the SATA 0 drive already, no need to change that.

I just ran into this problem as well setting up my Gateway computer. I have one IDE slot that has the DVD burner and CD drive chained in a master slave configuration, and a 200gig SATA hard drive. There are 3 more SATA slots on the motherboard for additional devices, but I don't want to throw away my year-old 120gig IDE drive. So I did some research on the internet and found that they make an SATA to IDE Converter. For about $20 bucks you buy the connector and attach it to the back of the IDE Drive. The other end of the connector is a SATA plug. Attach the appropriate power source to the drive, get an ATA cable and plug it into the 2nd ATA Slot. The boot order is determined by the number on the motherboard slot. Mine is numbered SATA-0, SATA-1, SATA-2, SATA-3. So I will plug my "Slave IDE" drive into SATA-1 since SATA-0 has my primary SATA drive already attached. Gateway couldn't confirm this would work. They never heard of the gizmo. You can find it here, but I'm going to check out the computer stores later today to see if they have one. http://sewelldirect.com/SerialATAtoIDEConverter.asp?adPath=/