IDE/SATA adapter

[waco]

This really a crossover question. I rebuilt my wife's older system, and the only hardware I kept in the case was two optical drives and one hard drive, all three being PATA or IDE. Since the mobo only had one IDE connector, I used it for the optical drives. For the hard drive, I bought one of those adapters that plugs into the back of it and gives you a conversion to enable you to hook the hard drive up to a SATA connector on the mobo. The machine boots up fine giving one short beep but cannot find the hard drive. I went into the BIOS and changed boot priority putting the hard drive first. Any ideas what I'm missing besides just buy a SATA hard drive? XP is already on the hard drive, and I was hoping to just slip right into Windows without any hassle.

[Moparmike]

Boy, I can't say that I've had any problems with the Abit brand SATA/PATA adapter that came with one of my motherboards. It was just plug-n-play and I haven't had any problems with it in the past 5 years or so.

It might be possible that your adapter is dead or maybe you've got an intermittent power supply connection too.

Do you have another hard drive that you can try to see if it is the drive or the adapter? Maybe try swapping a different power supply cable onto the line too.

[waco]

Mike, I disconnected one of the optical drives and hooked the hard drive in it's place on the IDE cable. Windows XP SP3 starts right up, although do get the warning I have 3 days to reactivate it. I know there's sata controller drivers in SP3, because I had to slip stream it onto Windows SP2 on another machine a while back to get Windows installed. With the two optical drives using the IDE connector and the IDE hard drive using the adapter to connect to a SATA connector on the mobo, the hard drive isn't recognized in the BIOS. And naturally I couldn't check it under the HardWare tab in the task manager. I haven't a clue as to why.