using a SATA and IDE harddrive together

I

Imagine3

New Member
Is it possible to use both an IDE and SATA hard drive together on the same system. I just got home from TigerDirect with a new hard drive (IDE) only to find out that the current hard drive is SATA. There are the ports on the mother board to use both SATA and IDE drives (The 2 CD-Roms/DVD drives are IDE).

I have installed many hard drives before but for some reason the drive is not appearing in My Computer.

Let me start over abuot how I installed it. I connected the IDE drive to the mother board. When I booted the computer I got an error because the computer didn't know where to boot from. So I am guessing it is having a problem with designating what drive is a master and which is a slave. The New IDE is set as a Slave, but I am not sure what the SATA is set at. The plug is covering the 2 pins on the far right for that SATA drive. I went into the boot menu and it shows both drives but I am unable to move one of the other up higher to boot from it first.

I can select what drive to boot from and when I choose the older drive, it boots like normal and everything works, just the new ones doesn't show up in windows. I used SIW (System Information for Windows) from http://www.gtopala.com/ to see the system and it does show the drive in there, just for some reason it will not show up in My Computer. Any ideas on why it won't show up and how to fix this problem?

By the way, Someone on here showed me how to set up a Samba server on my Linus box and it works wonderfully. You guys here can be the biggest help ever. I am hoping this is true for this little problem as well.
 
SATA isn't set master/slave. You should be able to set which one to boot from in the BIOS

To see the drive in my computer you need to initialize, partition and format it in the disk management section of computer management (right click my computer->manage)
 
On your first question I run two 250gb ide drives along with a 500gb sata in one case here. Each has a different version of Windows installed onto them. In order to be seen in MyComputer a drive first has to be partitioned at least in order for Windows to assign a logical drive letter to it. First go to the Disk Management under Storage found in the Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management. Once there all drives detected will be shown as retangular blocks with either an assigned drive letter or seen as unallocated space.

When seen in the Disk Management tool just like seen with the utility you downloaded you will know Windows is properly detecting the new drive. If that is the only ide hard drive it should be set as master on the end of the primary ide cable. The jumper is usually set to master or cable select depending whether the system is prebuilt or custom. A drive partitioning will then be needed to create the one or primary or additional extended partitions on the drive in order to be seen in Windows Explorer which is used when opening the MyComputer desktop icon as well.
 
That worked perfectly but the drive is a 320GB drive, it is only reading 32GB. When I go to set the partition, it only allows 32248 MB. Is there some reason for this or is it a faulty drive possibly?
 
What board or system are you running there? That sounds like what would be seen on an older 586 or AMD K5 setup where the LBA setting in the bios to enable large drive support is found. Are you running XP or an older version of Windows like 98 or ME?
 
It is a XP Pro, it is fully up to date with updates and running SP2 (so that whole 137 GB thing isn't an issue. I also have a 120 GB drive on there that shows 117, so that is about right. the only branding i can see on the motherboard is an ASUS heat sink.
 
How was the drive partitioned? With the 32.248gb only seen as a logical drive the creation of the partition seen at that figure depends on whether the total drive space available was reduced in the XP installer window or when using a 3rd party partitioning tool. If you only created a smal primary the 287gb approximate would be seen as unallocated drive space.

When going to partition a drive here I often use the Gnome Partition Editor which is a free Linux tool that can be used for creating new NTFS and Fat partitions as well as VFat types for Linux. It's an easy tool when you are splitting a drive up into more then one single primary. You can also use that to increase or reduce the size of a current primary or extended partition if you made a goof by reducing the size when going to install Windows.

For dual OSing and even custom installations on more then one partition GParted has been put to work here often enough. You simply download one of the free versions for cd found at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

On an Asus board you can go right into the bios and set the boot order for the ide drive after you have it partitioned the way you want it. The Linux tool will clearly detect a working drive even if you use another partitioning tool. That can even remove Vista partitions as well as creating new NTFS partitions for the new version of Windows to install onto.
 
I just went into the disk management section, initialized it, then partitioned it as a primary drive. The logical option was grayed out and unable to be selected. When I tried to raise the total size I got an error saying I couldn't do that. i have used gparted many times setting up my Ubuntu machines. I will try to give that a try next.
 
I tried using the latest 0.3.3.5 version out last night and it failed when entering the "startx" command for some unknown reason. So I downloaded the 0.3.3.0 version to see the usual boot option with the default 24 and 1024x768 resolution menus appear. That's the "platform independent" release in case you need to go for another download of it.

For running three versions of Windows on three drives(one sata) it's a life saver at times. "can someone throw out a life jacket?" I thought I would let you know that little bug seen with the latest release seen at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
 
with sata, there are no master-slave positions. that means that your ide drive should be set as primary, not slave. also the hard disk with the operating system should be the boot disk. check this in the bios if u can.
 
I boot Windows from the slave ide drive here as well as from the primary or sata drive installed just by using the F8 boot menu option seen at post. Once a drive is set as the 1st in the boot order it will automatically load the installation of Windows there according to the boot loader which is the boot.ini file for XP. The sata drives will be seen as sata master #1 and sata master #2
 
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