Hey all, I had a quick question. A friend of mine recently gave me a 500 gb Hitachi Hard drive for free, hehe yeah i know way nice. here is my problem, it is a IDE drive, and my mobo only has 1 IDE channel, and both of the connections are in use by a CD/rw and a DVDRW. I cant downgrade to one drive cuz i need both of them, and for some reason the dvdrw wont read normal cds. anyway, I have four SATAII connections, one of them in use by my WD 500 gig drive. I Purchased an IDE to SATA adaptor off of ebay hopeing that would work. the adaptor is designed for SATA I but I read somewhere that SATA is forward and backward compatible. I plugged it into the HD, and then into the mobo, and it didnt work. I played with the jumpers, tried it on master, slave, cable select, even took the jumpers out completly, and nothing worked. wouldnt even recognize the drive in bios. anyone have any suggestions? is it the adaptor? do I need to get one that is SATA II? or do i have to do something special? I would really like the extra 500 gig of HD space, even if its at a slower transfer speed. My mobo is a gigabyte S3, with an AMD athlon 64 x2 6000+

Hard to tell without knowing the exact adapter.

Some samples here:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ta+ide+adapter

Some adapt the drive end and some adapt the port end.

The drive end adapters usually require two molex connections. One to the drive and one to the adapter.

In the long run I'd suggest a PCI IDE card:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...q=pci+ide+card

theres no brand on it, got it from some place in Hong kong. it said reliable US and i was stupid and trusted it till i saw the return address. i only paid like 3 bucks for it so it wasnt a huge loss. Im uploading pics of it hopefully that will help. Also, theres a little button on it you will see in the pic, press it once and it does nothing under power. press it again, and 2 little red lights light up, so its getting power. Im just not sure what its doing as i have never made an adaptor before, and im fairly new to SATA devices. Ive done a lot of research on it, but as far as experience this is my first comp to actually have SATA on it so its a new experience for me.

oh yeah these are the photos from the sight, though its the same thing. only real difference is the chip I got is green. if you want a pic of the one I got i can get one of it to.

So you have power to the adapter and the hard drive?

Two power connections?

yes they are. the thing is sata I though-should that matter as its going to a SATA II port?

No it shouldn't matter. Unless it cannot handle the drive size.

Try putting your DVD or CD drive (whichever is Master) on to this adapter then use the Master IDE on the hard drive.

Or else again I'd suggest a PCI IDE Controller Card. If you do get one verify that it handles drives over 137GB. Most new models will.

I didnt think of doing that, I will try that and tell you how it goes. I know the hard drive does work since I tested it by taking out the dvd momentarily, and when i plug it into the sata and the power i can hear it spin up. but yeah ill give that a try and tell ya how it works.

I tried putting the HD on the IDE and the DVD drive on the adaptor. this time, for whatever reason windows wouldnt access the hard drive unless i reformated it (odd cuz it was in NTFS) so i reformated it and it worked, but the DVD drive wouldnt work. I think the problem is the adaptor, the little red light has stopped coming on for some reason, think the adaptor was cheap and stopped workin altogether. i contacted the seller but prolly wont do any good. its a cheapo from hong kong. by the way if ur on ebay, and u see a company called h2 electronics and it says reliable US dont trust it its lying, its a hong kong company. anyway, thanks for your advice.

A PCI IDE Controller card is a much more viable interface.

It will also allow for two new cables or four new drives.

Just verify that it is capable of hard drives over 137GB which any recent model should be.