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General discussion

SYSTEM REBUILD!! HELP!!! SATA / IDE ISSUES!!!!

Dec 5, 2006 11:18AM PST

Hi all. Im new to this forum and hoping you all can help. I'm gutting my Dell Optiplex Case and replacing it with a Dell Dimension 8400 mobo, p4 3.4 ghz proc, new power supply, etc....

My problem is this. . . . I carried over my 20gb ide (ata/100) boot drive and my 200gb ide (ata/133) into the new build. My new mobo has 4 SATA connections, 2 PATA connections, and 1 floppy, 1 ide connection. I bought 3 sata to ide converters so I could connect my ide drives into the SATA mobo connections. Two of the converters were used for the HDs and the other was used for one of my two DVD drives. The other DVD was connected to the ide slot. At system boot, all seemed to go smoothly but my OS (Win XP Pro) never started up. Running win setup to try and recover the OS, I got an error screen stating that Windows detected a potential fatal error if it were to proceed. IT cited that my HD either had a virus or there was a problem with the HD controller.

I know my HD does not have any viruses. I reverted my system back to what it was before my build and here I am using my system just fine. Im wondering if the SATA to IDE converters are not compatible with my HDs. If so, what might you all recommend????

Thanks all

Discussion is locked

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Why use the converters?
Dec 5, 2006 1:00PM PST

You said you had "My new mobo has 4 SATA connections, 2 PATA connections, and 1 floppy, 1 IDE connection. " Can't you just plug the ATA IDE drives into the 2 PATA connections? I maybe lost here but I thought that ATA was the same as PATA. "S" in SATA is serial and "P" in PATA is for parallel, which has been added to ATA to keep confusion at bay. I'm lost again.

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PATA mix-up
Dec 5, 2006 8:39PM PST

You are totally right. The connections I was referring to were PATA connections. So my floppy connections (ide) and my DVD connection (ide) are my PATA. Sorry for the mix-up

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For almost all PCs, the floppy was never an IDE interface.
Dec 5, 2006 8:46PM PST