I'm having problems installing an old HD into my new computer. I noticed the new computer's HD is an SATA, and my old HDs are both ATAs.

My old computer is an HP (circa 2001), 700MHz. It came with a 40GB Maxtor and I later installed an extra 20GB Maxtor that fell into my lap because I badly needed the space.

What I would like to do is take the 20GB slave from my old computer and install it into the new one in order to transfer the files from the slave drive onto the master of my new computer. Having done that, I would take the slave drive out of the new computer and replace it with the master of my old computer. I would then use my old 40GB master as a slave until I eventually buy a larger HD.

Now, I ran into problems last night on my attempt. After installing the old slave into my new computer, it refused to finish booting up, insisting that there was a "non-system disk" that needed to be removed. I've encountered this problem once before while originally installing the 20GB slave into my old computer until I figured out what I was doing.

However, I'm not sure how to get around this one. I can only guess that the problem is that the old ATA's connect to the motherboard off of IDE ribbon cables and they have to be in a specific order for the BIOS to know which is the master and the slave. Now, since the slave is the lone HD on the ribbon cable, I'm guessing that the BIOS is confused as to which is the master and simply rejects the idea of booting up at all.

Any help or further elucidation would be greatly appreciated.

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I think you have to change some settings in the BIOS. There should be a choice of ATA or SATA somewhere.

On each of your old hard disks, there will be some jumpers near where the ribbon cable connects, and you'll have to set these correspondingly to what you want the disk to be. Cable-select has always been a bit of a pain in the arse!

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It depends what the jumper is set to. BIOS defaults the closest channel on the ribbon cable to master. If it's on a ribbon by itself, put it on the channel closest to the motherboard and set it to cable select. That way it can auto assign it in case something else is demanding master. Just check your jumpers. Also you can't install a SATA HD into a computer who's motherboard doesn't have a SATA port. SATA and ATA are two entirely different interfaces.

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The SATA HD came pre-installed with the computer. Everything is working fine with that. The problem is now installing an old ATA HD as a slave drive so I can transfer data from the old HD to the new.

On the 20GB that was the slave on my old computer there was only one jumper. I removed it because a HD without a jumper is supposed to be recognized as a slave automatically, or at least that's how it works on a system that only holds ATA HDs. The jumper shouldn't be a problem right now.



I can try again and be sure to hook up the HD to the channel closest to the motherboard. I'm not sure how to set it to cable select, though. I'm not especially good with hardware so, again, any help is appreciated.

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Where the jumpers are, there should be a little key for it on the label of the HD. It may just be abbreviated to 'CS', and you may have to install the jumper across two connectors as opposed to downwards maybe:
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The problem is all taken care of. Thanks for all your help.

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YAY PROBLEMZ SOLVESZ!!!11

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