SATA master, IDE slave - is this right?

bee1000

New Member
This is my first attempt at building a PC. Motherboard is Asus P5GD2 Deluxe.

I have an existing IDE (ATA?) hard drive, and a new WD Raptor (Which apparently was a waste of money according to the FAQ on this forum. Oh well, live and learn).

The old drive is a 40GB IBM, and I only want to have it around to transfer files to the new drive. In the future I'll replace the 40GB drive will a larger storage drive and use the WD as a working drive (primarily for Photoshop).

Having read a few forums, I think I know what I have to do, but can someone please confirm?

1. Connect both SATA and IDE as masters, since they're on separate channels.

Question - Do I use the same cable with 2 attachment points, or a separate cable for each?

2. Set the boot order so the SATA (which may be called SCSI in the BIOS) is ahead of the IDE.

Second question: I saw someone else had trouble when installing Windows in a similar setup. Windows installed on the IDE drive as a default (I think it was disk 0 on the mobo?)

So should I disable the IDE drive when installing WinXP, so it doesn't install on the old drive? (It currently has Win2K on it, but it won't boot. I'm hoping to recover data from it once all the new stuff is set up)

Thanks!
 
Question - Do I use the same cable with 2 attachment points, or a separate cable for each?
SATA by definition has to be on its own cable
So should I disable the IDE drive when installing WinXP, so it doesn't install on the old drive?
The install should show you both HDDs and let you pick one to install to
 
I've never heard of a cable that connects SATA and IDE using one cord, dont even think its possible. Why would you need to set them both as master?
 
Sorry, i was meaning to say why would you set the IDE as master? if your loading the os from the SATA drive, there is no reason to set it as master.
 
Because you put the SATA drive on one of the master SATA channels and make the PATA drive master of its channel.
 
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