IDE Drives Sold Out

[RJ Johnston]

I went into Fry's Electronics to buy an IDE hard drive and found that they no longer sell them. All gone. So I bought a SATA controller on a PCI card and a SATA drive. All of that works okay, but now I'm wondering if there is a way to make the SATA drive the primary boot drive. My Dell Dimension 3000 P4 computer came with primary and secondary IDE controllers. The BIOS doesn't list the SATA drive, so I'm thinking that I'm out of luck. Is it possible and practical?

[sidd finch]

I thought the physical drive had a small jumper (J50) that when connected makes the drive the boot drive and when removed it makes the drive a secondary drive.

Sidd

[VernonRobinson]

RJ,
It may be a function of the SATA Controller card that you have. I recently put a 1 TB drive in a Pentium IV 2.8 Ghz machine. The bios does not recognize the drive, but the bios on the Controller Card was discovered by the Operating System when I reinstalled XP. So XP is running on the 1 TB drive even though it does not show in the bios.

HTH,
-Vernon

[RJ Johnston]

Thanks guys. Now that I know it's possible, I 'll be more confident in installing XP on a SATA. I also ran into a problem when XP asked me to insert a floppy in drive A with any required 3rd party SCSI drivers, etc. I didn't have a floppy. The driver was only on a CD.