Sata and IDE compatibility.

I recently bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS 500GB HD. I currently have two 80GB IDE HDs [Maxtor YAR41BWO(master), and Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380011A(slave)] and the master is rapidly becoming defunct as I recieve more and more disc boot errors. Having read other posts here I'm wondering whether SATA is at all compatible with IDE when running multiple HDs and if so whether it relies on the IDE or SATA drive being set to master.

I thought that I may have to purchase an adaptor of one sort or another to allow the two to function together, but really I have little to no knowledge when it comes to PCs and even less when it comes to self managing hardware.

If the two are compatible is it possible to copy/clone data files from the IDE device to the SATA device as I read elsewhere that copying/cloning program files can cause boot problems.

Im running XP.

Thankyou in advance, Jack.

 

I am currently running 2 SATA drives and 1 IDE drive...I have windows installed on the SATA, and the IDE is just there cause i'm too lazy to copy the stuff off of it. But it's working fine. If you are particular about your drive letters being in a certain order, you might have to tinker with them once everything is installed. I would try to clone it, but in your case you might not want to, if you are having problems, any extra reading of that drive could cause it to get worse....I would install the SATA drive, install windows, then once all is well, plug the IDE drive in, and when you get into windows, copy anything you want to the new drive. All this is assuming your computer's motherboard has SATA connections....You might need to get a SATA pci or pci express card if you don't have it on your motherboard.

 

Thankyou very much, it all went through smoothly. Though it appears my old hard drive was far more corrupt than I first thought (the fact I dropped it during installation probably didn't help very much either...:-o). Thankfully I managed to copy the majority of important files across before it retired for good.

Trouble is now I am encountering an issue that appears to have affected several other users in regards to the instalation of Realtek Audio drivers. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=148318
But I am following methods listed in that thread in an attempt to resolve the issue.

Will keep posted on that if there is any interest but otherwise thanks again for the help. You are enlightening many technologically illiterate noobs and I have new-found respect for IT peoples.

 

depending on where you get the driver, it might already have the UAA driver in it...as mine did from gigabyte, or you might have picked it up from windows update. tho the hotfix referenced in that other post wasn't getting installed automatically...I'm not sure if microsoft has changed it since either. If you choose to inquire more about it, i would suggest starting another thread with that as the subject so more people can see it.

 

All sorted I hope. I ran a clean re install of windows and then reading through the mobo manual stumbled upon this; "Before installing the audio driver, make sure the 'Microsoft UAA Bus driver for High Definition Audio' has been installed from the mobo driver disk and your OS has been updated with the latest server pack".

2 hours later with SP3 installed I attempted again, but got a UAA install error, so I rolled back to SP2 and tried again and it went off without a hitch. installed UAA from driver disk followed by Realtek HD driver and low and behold youtube had sound.

Thanks again for all your help. Jack