can i have a IDE primary and SATA II secondary?

[ShadoWing]

I already have my hard drive set up with os, everything. I want to add a SATA II hard drive as a 2ndary. Is this possible or do I have to make it my primary and reformat the IDE drive? I tried to make the SATA 2ndary and it doesn't show up on My Computer

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

[ch33zw1z]

No you don't have to reformat. SATA drives are assigned automatically by your controller. is the drive seen in BIOS?

 

[corkyg]

PATA is PATA and SATA is SATA. They have no master/slave relationship. Primary, I assume means the boot drive? And if that is what you have, that won't change. Adding a SATA drive or array for data would, by my definition be "secondary." That is what I currently have.

In order to get a SATA drive "seen," you have to do what your mobo guide says. In mine, the SATA ports have to be turned "ON" in BIOS first. Then the SATA/RAID drivers have to be installed. Once all that is in place, you should have no trouble.

 

[ShadoWing]

thanks guys, just went into disk management and voila, established it from there lol

 

[PowerEngineer]

What corkyg said...

Judging from your sig, your rig is about 4-5 years old like mine. I recently added a WD 320 Gb SATA drive to my PC. The SATA drivers on my old Gigabyte motherboard were already installed and all I really had to do was plug the cables in. That said, the WD drive installation software made it easy to make partitions on the new drive and allowed me to copy partitions from my old IDE drives (twin 40 GB Seagates). I copied all my existing partitions onto the SATA drive, including the windows os partition (the WD software handled the relettering to C. I noticed a significant improvement in speed, particularly during boot-up, with the os on SATA. I turned my twin 40 GB Seagates into a Raid-1 array for data. YMMV.