Help with IDE - SATA

aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
edited December 2006 in Hardware
Ok, I just bought a Dell E520. It came with a ATAII 250gig harddrive but no IDE connections so that I could use my old drive. I bought a SATA to IDE dongle that lets you hook up IDE to devices to an SATA interface. I activated the port (port 4) in the BIOS and hooked up the drive. However, when computer starts, and the BIOS screen comes up (the page that says hit F2 to enter setup, yadda yadda) it just stops. How can I get this to work?? Am I not setting up something correctly? PLEASE HELP!

Comments

  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    aloneinshadow wrote:
    Ok, I just bought a Dell E520. It came with a ATAII 250gig harddrive but no IDE connections so that I could use my old drive. I bought a SATA to IDE dongle that lets you hook up IDE to devices to an SATA interface. I activated the port (port 4) in the BIOS and hooked up the drive. However, when computer starts, and the BIOS screen comes up (the page that says hit F2 to enter setup, yadda yadda) it just stops. How can I get this to work?? Am I not setting up something correctly? PLEASE HELP!

    Confused why this machine would ship with a IDE drive. I was under the impression that Dell had gone (almost) 100% SATA. Was the drive installed? Does it have an OS?

    Never used a IDE > SATA before, but may I ask why you would go to port 4? This may actually be port 3, since most configurations start with port 0, then 1, 2, 3.

    My suggestion is to shut everything down, and reconnect to port 0(1). boot up into the BIOS, activate port 0(1), restart, and see if she comes up...
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    Rada, it came with an SATAII drive. He had an old IDE drive that he wanted to hook up, so he bought a SATA -> IDE converter.

    Alone, make sure that the IDE drive is set to <b>master</b> on the drive's jumper next to the ribbon cable's port.
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    Drive is set to Master on its jumpers. Still not helping anything. The dongle I bought was item N82E16812206002 from Newegg
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    Sorry misread you message...

    Have to tell you dell machines are notoriously bad at reconizing non-Dell equipment. Does this drive your installing has an OS on it? Are you trying to use it as your primary drive? Or is it a bare drive, you just want to use for extra storage?

    I've seen situations where a Dell machine will not recognize a HD from another Dell (2 different Models).
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    its a drive that used to be my main drive from my old computer. Its a WD600. Yes it does have an operating system on it, but I ran into the same problem with my old slave drive as well. I also tried this dongle with an IDE Plextor dvd writer and I still get the same heartache. Now, in the Bios under the drives menu, it shows the drive as hooked up! But, when it comes to loading up the computer, it just freezes up.
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    In most situations, Dell BIOS prefers drives to be set to "cable select". I know this goes against everything we've been taught, but it is Dell we're talking about here...
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    Also, there are no IDE ports on this computer, only ATAII.
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    I tried to do the exact same thing your doing with for a friend, I could never get his Dell machine to recognize the "foreign" HDD. I was able to slave the foreign HDD to his Dell machine on the CD/RW port, so he could pull his data though.
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    Did your new machine come with a ATAII drive loaded w/ an OS? Does it boot OK?
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    Yes it came with a WD ATAII 250gb that came preloaded with an OS. Here's something. In my bios, it says something about the drives and if they're RAID all the time or do I want to choose Automatic. Mine comes default RAID. So I switched it. It loads past the bios screen and shows the windows loading screen but then I get a BSOD. *shrugs*
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    aloneinshadow wrote:
    Yes it came with a WD ATAII 250gb that came preloaded with an OS. Here's something. In my bios, it says something about the drives and if they're RAID all the time or do I want to choose Automatic. Mine comes default RAID. So I switched it. It loads past the bios screen and shows the windows loading screen but then I get a BSOD. *shrugs*

    How old is this IDE drive? What OS do you have loaded on it?

    I'd have to say that this is really sounding like the 520 is trying to boot from the foreign drive, and since it can't find certain Dell-specific information, its crashing..
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited December 2006
    Also, if the machine is trying to configure a RAID with 2 drives, both with OSs' installed on them you could have serious issues...

    Try turning off all Auto-RAID settings...
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    MDL: WD600BB-18CCB0
    Date: 14 JAN 2002
    DCM: DREHBT2AH

    Win XP is the OS loaded. It came from my Dell 2400.

    I tried another harddrive, a WD400 without an OS and still had the same problem.
  • aloneinshadowaloneinshadow
    edited December 2006
    how would I turn off all Auto-RAID settings?
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited December 2006
    So, the old IDE drive also has Windows XP (and probably that Dell 2400 specific information), and the SATAII drive has WinXP on it as well. This is probably causing a conflict and the Dell 2400 info on the old drive is conflicting with the current drive, and thats causing it to crash.

    What about getting an external USB hard drive enclosure and placing the hard drive inside it and connecting it once the new computer has booted up all the way.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    That's not it at all.

    The drive is freezing the computer at POST. The computer doesn't even know an OS is there at that point.
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