I bought a new computer (P4, 3.06ghz,250gig,2gig ram) I added a dvd burner, and I was thinking of putting in another hard drive. The setup for the HDD was sata, and my 2nd HDD was Ide, so I got a IDE to sata converter. When I turned it on it only read my original and even though the power light was on for the converter, no second one. I got a separate Ide cable for the 2nd dvd burner so I could use them at the same time, and I did the same for the 2nd hdd, except for the sata converter, but still I can't seem to get it to work, the hdd works, the cables are all connected the right way, and the power light for the converter is on, don't know what I did wrong. I tried switching the hard drives around and see if that made a difference but nothing, I just get my original. I was thinking of using the secondary connection from one of my dvd burners, since that is ide already, but not sure if it will work. Hope you guys can help, thanks.
each motherboard ide connector handles 2 drives which is why the ide cable has 3 connectors, motherboard & 2 drives. if computer is a clone then set the drive selector jumper to master on 1 drive & slave on the other drive. if a dell then set the drives' jumper to cable select.
Well sammorris, in neither, not in bios and not in windows, the only drives that are present are the two dvd burners, and the hdd that the computer came with. My computer is a Compaq Presario, there are only two ide connections and those are being used by the two dvd burners I read somewhere that if I am to use them at the same time, each should have its own connection, instead of sharing one cable, the original hdd is sata and connected to 1 of 4 sata slots(black, grey, blue, yellow). I bought the ide to sata converter cause I had a 300gig external hard drive, but IT was ide and the only setup I saw in the computer for a hard drive was sata, one red cord and a power cord, no pins like ide. And ddp, the hdd that the pc came with was not set to either master, slave, or cable select, maybe because it was sata I don't know how they work, all I know is ide. I can set the ide hdd to slave and see if that does anything, but the sata hdd is already set to master somehow, but I do see a slot that looks like the ide one where you choose, master, slave, or cable slect, but instead of 6 pins it has 8, so I don't know which would be master, slave, or cable select, there are no markings or letters to guide you. Hope you guys can help.
Why do you want it on the PC rather than externally anyway? It sounds to me like the adapter you bought isn't working. S-ATA drives should be a doddle to add. It'll probably need it's own power, is that connected? If it doesn't, I'm a bit dubious.
Sata drives are by default Master. You cannot change them. on Seagate drives, the jumper is to enable Sata 2. As for the Ide drive, Set it to Master w/the adapter. It should be marked or look on the manufacturers website. Do you have installation software? If not D/L it for the drives site! Sometimes you have to use the Software to set the partition before the drive can be seen by windows. The bios should see it if connected properly. Do you have the power hooked to the sata module? You have to have power to the drive and the module! Now for the kicker. In my experience, the sata modules are useless on Amd based Mobo's. The only way I could get them to work is with a pci adapter card. They do seem to work on some Intel based Mobo's. Also, never, never run an Ide drive as a slave to an optical drive. If you decide to run the Ide drive Daisy chained to the DVD drives, make sure to set the optical drive to slave. As a thought, with 80 wire ribbon cables, I haven't had any problems with two optical drives on one port. They may be faster on two, but unless they are Identical, most software will write to a cache,before burning. Most times you can't use Ide HD's and optical drives on the same cable as most are not long enough. Unless of course you mount the HD near the Optical drive.
