I bought a new computer but want to use many of the purchased programs and tp access data on my old hard drive with the new computer, preferably by making the old drive a second drive. The CD burner on my old computer is dead. The problem I've encountered is that the new HD is SATA whild the old one is IDE. I can't just plug them into each other or to the mother board.
I've gotten a lot of different answers from the so-called computer pros around here and they are confusing. A friend says I can use an IDE to SATA converter board to solve the problem. I found one online for $15 and ordered it.

What problems am I likely to encounter trying to do this and how can I solve them? The old puter is a Gateway Pentium 233 running Win '98. Its 40G HD is only a year or two old, however.
The new puter is an HP Pentium 4 with an 80G HD running Windows XP.

Thanks for your help,
Jeanne (Mystkitty)

Hi Jeanne, welcome to SAF,

Some motherboards will accept both IDE and SATA hard drives, so, please post your mobo make/model (and your HD make/model) as we can take a look around.

Chris

QUOTE

Some motherboards will accept both IDE and SATA hard drives, so, please post your mobo make/model (and your HD make/model) as we can take a look around.

Yes you shouldn't have to much trouble just hooking up the IDE hdd as well.
I have had to do this before the set up had 2 hdds in raid and I added a 40GB IDE hdd and didn't have any issues.

If the motherboard doesn't have an IDE channel (I'll bet it does), you can also get an IDE to USB adapter or case and then plug it into one of the USB ports. These are usually around $30.