ive got a hard drive connect through SATA on my motherboard as the master. i want to put one in connected through ide and run it as primary so i can put an OS on it and transfer files off of the SATA HDD without having to run an OS off of it. but i cant even get my bios to recognize the HDD connected through ide... any advice?
if you mean to use as an external hard drive, ive already got one. but i dont want to start moving files while running the OS off of this hard drive because its screwy. and i have no other computers with sata
If I understand you correctly, you have a system with SATA and PATA (i.e. IDE). You have 1 SATA drive and use that as the primary. You then want to add a PATA drive on the IDE bus, and use THAT instead as the primary.
Well, shit, that should be easy.
0. Make sure the PATA drive is set to MASTER on the cable. You could also set it to CABLE SELECT and set it at the end plug on the cable.
1. Make sure the BIOS recognizes all hard drives.
2. Setup the boot order to make the PATA drive boot FIRST.
After that, the system should boot from the PATA drive. If the drive is blank, then load the OS onto it for something to boot into. JUST TO BE SURE, when loading the OS, unplug the SATA drive! After installing the OS is completed, you can reattach the SATA.
okay, i got it working. after i was able to see the pata drive with windows i figured i would be able to install windows on it. so i did. and now it just asks me which one i want to use. which is good enough for me because this is all temporary until i get all the files i need backed up.
oh, and i think the problem was something in my bios called "PXI something-or-other" which was disabled. after i enabled it i could see it on my bios, but since there was nothing on it, it would still load from the sata. but thats all irrelevant because ive got it doing what i need.