Installing SATA HDD alongside IDE

bingo_bango

Hi,
Uncle of mine has bought a 160GB SATA HDD without realising that he has an IDE interface on his MOBO. He wanted to install this as a master alongside the current 20GB IDE HDD which was to act as a slave drive.
Rather than going back and exchanging the drive for IDE (the retailer currently has none available), I was wondering if there are any cheap options?
I can get him a PCI SATA card quite cheaply, or an IDE to SATA convertor, but will this allow me to install this as a master, or is there no way round this?

vgopal

pci sata will work. why cant you install the sata drive on the pci card, (sata has no master or slave) and leave the other drive as it is. you dont need to make it a slave because nothing is changing

Weth

When you say convert IDE to SATA, are you sure you're not just talking about the power convertor.You can't convert an IDE cable to SATA but of course you can buy a SATA pci card,but will probably need the convertor anyway for the power supply he's got installed in the case.

rogerramjet

For a SATA drive to be set as master (boots first) once the interface has been setup you will need to enter the bios and set the first boot device to SCSI, this should then allow the drive to be seen.

see here for more info

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/sata_install_tshoot.html

bingo_bango

Thanks for all the replies so far.

SATA PCI card is my personal favourite, as it should leave me less to do (and I'm assuming that using this, the SATA drive will just show up as another drive, with the PC still booting from the current IDE master, or can the SATA drive then be set to master?).

As for the SATA to IDE convertor, I was looking at similar to http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IDE-to-SATA-Convert-IDE-Motherboard-to-SATA-C21-US_W0QQitemZ9736042308QQcategoryZ74941QQssPageNameZWD2VQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

But this convertor option wouldn't allow me to connect both drives (only one free IDE slot on MOBO). There is another that fits the SATA connection on the drive itself, and provides an IDE male connector to plug the normal cable into. That would allow me to connect both and set the SATA to master.