PC won't start when I hook up an IDE drive

[T9D]

Hi. I gave my friend my old PC and he wanted to move his old storage Harddrive with all his stuff on it into it. The PC I gave him uses a SATA drive as the boot drive. It boots fine with that one. But when I put in the old IDE drive it wont boot. I made sure the boot sequence is the SATA drive first. The IDE drive is on it's own line and not a slave. I also tried it as a slave drive on the CD rom line. That didn't work either. Is there anything else I should do? I'm guessing it just wants to try to boot off the IDE drive. I don't know why or how to stop that and just make it boot from the SATA.

 

[Billb2]

I would guess that there is a mismatch somewhere in:
What connector on the data cable the IDE drive is on.
What the jumpers are set for on the IDE drive.
What is set as the boot device.

Most moderm BIOSs will default to searching out a SATA drive if there is something wrong with drive configuration.

And your friend won't be able to use the programs on the old IDE drive. They have never been installed to the new OS on the SATA drive.
Data, yes (pictures, videos, documents, etc.).
Programs, no (games, software, anything that modifies the registry when it installs).

 

[corkyg]

Your guess is correct. The system is trying to boot off of the PATA drive. Try removing it in BIOS completely from the boot sequence.

When all else fails, a work around is to put that drive into an external USB 2 case and hot plug it when needed after boot. That way it won't be a factor in the boot cycle.