thank you for your reply. I had a friend ck the system out and he said this unit had two hard drives and dell would not allow him to shut down the second hard drive.. he said i need another hard drive and controller card, and with this i will have a dual unit. so i guess i'll have to buy a second hard drive and controller card! ??????  ronn cross

--- On Mon, 3/23/09, Hugh Vandervoort <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Hugh Vandervoort <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] switching from ATA hard drive to SATA
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Monday, March 23, 2009, 2:36 AM

XP will ask for "Third Party" drivers during the setup-"Press
F6". AFAIK
they will have to be loaded from a floppy drive, which is often a sticking
point in machines without such a drive. You can slipstream the drivers into
an install disk, which is the course many people recommend.
You could also get a PATA drive instead, and use the SATA as a secondary
drive,



On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Thomas Mayer
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Since you have not yet received a reply to your inquiry, I will try to
> help. This should be a relatively painless process. Install the hard drive
> and the controller card and connect the data and power cable. However, you
> may find that the available power connector from the power supply does not
> fit the SATA drive and you will need to get a simple adapter (the
"power
> cable" you mention may be for that purpose). Start the computer,
check in
> the BIOS (check the Dell manual for directions) and set the CD-ROM as
first
> in the boot order, put the XP disk in the drive, and continue the boot
> process. The XP installation should begin and, during the process, it
should
> offer to set up your hard disk, and then it will continue the
installation.
> It is fairly user friendly and accepting the installation recommendations
is
> probably best for a novice. XP may request the driver off of the CD for
the
> controller card. Also, without a second hard disk, you do not need the
RAID
> function to be active.
>
> As a caveat, I have no direct experience with SATA drives, XP Pro, and
RAID
> controllers. I hope that that the foregoing is helpful.
>
> Tom
>
>
> Ronn Cross wrote:
>
>> i have a DELL PENT IV 2.6g missing the hard drive. I purchased A
seagate
>> baracuda 7200.10 250 gbytes SATA. unknown to me my ribbon data cable
would
>> not connect. I have now purchased a SATA RAID controller
card(CreativeI/O)
>> with data cable & a power cable.I'm quite sure I can
physically install the
>> hardware, but I'm lost about starting up the controller card,
adding
>> drivers,putting back on XP pro. Also I had to purchase a rescue disk
for xp
>> pro from DEll. I hope this makes sense...as you can see I am a
beginner
>> novice.
>> Any or all help would be highly appricated.....ronn
>>
>>

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         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml