Drive Ultra
Posted on Saturday, December 4th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
How do you configure an Ultra ATA/133 Hard Drive?
I have a new Gateway PC with a Serial ATA Hard Drive, and I want to add an old PATA 133 Hard Drive via a PCI Card. I have the card installed correctly (device driver shows it). How do I set it up so it shows up as an extra drive (don’t want it bootable)? I assume I need a power cord, a ribbon cable, but do I set it up on the jumpers as primary, slave, or nothing?
Thanks!!!!
Before using the card, most motherboards still come with on-board IDE ports in addition to the new SATA ports. I bet your motherboard has IDE built in. If it doesn’t , then use the PCI card. In device manager, open the card’s properties. You should see Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel. Make sure both channels are both enabled. Depending on which channel you have connect the ATA 133 drive, you will see it show up and you can set its DMA (Direct Memory Access) speed. Use DMA and not PIO (programmed input/output). PIO is much slower. As a rule of thumb, always connect to the primary IDE channel first. The jumper setting on IDE hard drives usually come preconfigured as Master/Single drive. This should be okay for you.
Each channel supports 2 devices which meas the card will support 4 IDE devices. Yes, you will need power cables which you case definitely has (12V Molex- it’s a 4 port female configuration).– the type that goes into DVD and CD drives.
As for ribbon cables, you card and IDE hard drive probably came with atleast 1. You can easily get one at your nearest IT store. If you have to buy one, get the rounded type as this improves air flow in the case.
The issue of the drive being bootable is another issue altogether. By default, it won’t be bootable. The way to make it bootable is to install operating system unto it with the drive set up as the first hard drive just before installing. Your CMOS settings allow you to do this. Otherwise, just plug in the drive, let windows autodetect and install it. Then you partition and format as you wish. Good luck.
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