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Connecting SATA and IDE Hard drives

2K views 4 replies 4 participants last post by  dlgknight 
#1 ·
First, thank you for providing such a great forum. This may be my first post, but this forum has helped me many times.

However, I find that now I must request additional assistance -
I finally built a new computer earlier this year, so i pulled the harddrive out of my old, decrepit computer before getting rid of the tower. I now find that i need some files that were on my old hard drive, and quickly(taxes :( ) The hard drive in my old computer was ide and my new one is using sata. The new tower does have a connection for ide though. However, if i hook both hard drives up, it tries to use the ide hd as the primary, and all i get is a black screen.

Now, to make things more interesting - about a year before i finally gave up on my old cpu, the boot sector on my hd had actually gone out. Rather than buy a new hd at the time, i pulled a smaller hd out of a tower that i had sitting around and used it as the boot drive, and hooked up my main hd as a slave drive. So, even if i wanted to just hook up my old hd and access the files, I can't.

So, the question - if i hook up the ide hd with my sata hd, how do i make it boot to the sata drive? note - when i do hook up both drives i can't even get to the bios. It goes straight to a black screen, and you can hear the old hd trying to boot but failing.

Thanks in advance for all your help.
 
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#3 ·
Hirens Boot CD. Burn the ISO to a cd-r using an iso burning software like burnxp(burn at low speed)

Boot with cd try Mini XP us the Disk Management to format the drive. Or Gparted mount the drive and format.

There may be still an MBR in the drive causing boot issues. (Note drive might be a different letter like E D F G)

After that if you can get into bios change the boot sequence to the OS drive.


Good luck.
 
#4 ·
Just set the boot order to boot to the sata drive first, or during post you may see a prompt to "press f## for boot menu" bring that up and select the SATA drive. Every physical drive will have an MBR to define the partition table, the bios is trying to boot to the first physical drive which will be the IDE port if the computer supports IDE, you must redirect it to the drive with the boot loader code.
 
#5 ·
Thanks for the quick replies. Hopefully I'll be able to try them out tonight.

raptor_pa - I would just change the boot order to point to the sata drive, however, in my bios without the ide drive connected the boot order just specifies Primary Drive, CD, and no other options. If I connect the IDE drive with the SATA drive, as i said in my post, all i get is a black screen. I can't get back into the bios with the ide drive connected. Not sure why, as it obviously should go through the post before trying to boot to the first drive...
 
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