Some Asus boards, and probably many others, have hard drive controllers that are either/or but not both SATA and IDE. I've seen this mainly if a RAID configuration is possible. If you select to use SATA, the corresponding IDE ports become unusable. Check your manual to see if this is the case.
On my current machine I have two 500gig SATA hard drives both in working condition, one running windows 7 and the other used for storage.
Now I also have an 80gig IDE hard drive running Ubuntu; which I have from my old machine. The 80gig IDE ran perfectly with a different SATA hard drive in the old machine (all I had to do was switch the boot order to use either Ubuntu on the 80gig IDE or Windows 7 on the old SATA hard drive).
I just recently tried bringing the 80gig IDE drive over to my new computer but it doesn't seem to be working. The Bios recognizes it as a 2500mb drive for some absurd reason. Any Ideas on how to get this to work?
Additional Info:
Mother Board: Asus A8-NE
Jumper settings for the IDE drive: CS

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