SATA and IDE hard drives together

Factual Questions
1

Is there any way I can use both an IDE and SATA hard drive on the same computer using Windows XP Home?

I’m having a spot of bother after installing a new SATA hard drive on my computer. I used to have 2 IDE hard drives - one with programs and one with files. My programs one died so I bought a brand spanking new SATA HD, eventually installed it as a clean install with Windows XP Home. My problem is that Windows can’t detect my old IDE hard drive, even though my motherboard can since I can see it when the computer first boots up.

2

That’s interesting. I just installed a fresh W2K professional on my PC and I run my OS on an IDE hard drive, and use a seagate SATA hard drive for all my data. The problem wasn’t getting the IDE drive to work, it was getting the SATA drive to work!

3

You may need to install drivers.

My motherboard has 4 ide channels. 2 regular, 2 built-in raid. WinXP wouldn’t read my Raid drives until I installed a driver and reboot.

4

IANACG (I am not a computer geek) - however I did a little Googling recently on this 'cos I’m thinking of getting a new drive, the answer seems to be mostly yes you can use SATA and IDE at the same time (with XP at least).

This link may be relevant (Or not!) It’s about running two SATA drives non-raid, not a IDE with a SATA, but

sounds like your prob -

(That’s Administrative Tools >Computer Management >Storage> Disk Management BTW)

Otherwise check to see if your MB is meant to do both IDE channels with SATA enabled and if so update your Bios and any drivers to the latest versions (SATA being newish people seem to be having “issues” with getting different combinations of hardware working harmoniously)

However some motherboards apparently disable the primary IDE channel if SATA is enabled (seems unlikely if your Bios is seeing the drive)

  • If this is so you could put the old drive on the secondary IDE channel (if you’ve only got one CD/DVD on it already). There’d be a performance hit of course - but if it’s just got files on not too bad (same with putting the drive in a USB2->IDE or Firewire->IDE external box - which would also make your data portable)

A better solution is probably to get a SATA->IDE adaptor (IIRC these are pretty cheap) so the old drive can sit happily on a SATA channel and everyone’s happy (tho’ you may need to play around as in the above link to set it up as a non-raid drive)