This new machine I just bought has given me enough headaches in 5 hours (hell, I'm sitting awake at 2:15 am writing to you guys), but the thing that is keeping me from being able to sleep is that it seems to only accept SATA drives, and I have 3 harddrives from my old machine that are IDE. One of teh drives is just backup, so I don't care about that, but one of my old drives is all files (mostly music), and the other, my old boot drive, has a ton of software that I wanted to transfer over to the new machine. My plan had been to quick transfer all the stuff from the old boot drive I wanted to the new boot drive, and then attach the old file drive as a second HD. This has now become a major problem.

First question, is there any kind of adapter out there, or a card, or something that will allow me to attach the IDE drive to the new machine that has no IDE input (or compatible power cables)? If so, are they expensive? That would be my first choice solution.

My backup plan would be to get a new processor for my old machine, which I planned to do at some point in the future when I rehabbed the machine for my kids' use, hook up the new machine's HD to the old machine (which can accept SATA), transfer my stuff over and figure out what to do about additional storage for teh new machine. Along those same lines, I guess I could buy a USB external HD as the backup for the new machine, and use that to transfer the data from teh old machine (although that would still necessitate my replacing the chip on teh old machine before I want to).

What a fucking pisser. For teh past 10+ years, every time I got a new computer, I'd just take the HD out of the old machine, hook it up to the new one, and transfer whatever files I wanted to salvage. Now suddenly, I can't do it. Two of my harddrives are all of 2 years old, and I don't want to trash them, not to mention the loss of the data.

Please tell me there's an adapter of some sort and it doesn't cost too much money.

Do you think this would work?

http://www.cooldrives.com/idehadrtosap.html

Heh, just you wait for another five years when ssd becomes standard. Although they'll probably still use SATA.

anyway. That looks like it should do the trick.

But how are there no IDE connections? How is your floppy disk drive connected?

Who the hell still has a floppy drive?

Anyone that wants to set up a RAID configuration.

There is actually an IDE port on teh board for a floppy, but that is a 32(?) pin port, and hard drives and optical drives usually use a 40 pin port.

And I actually did have a floppy on my last machine, but it was also a card reader. My new machine has the card reader without the floppy.

I guess I've forgotten about IDE since it has been so long. I'm surprised your harddrives weren't already SATA since they were only two years old.

You're going to love the sata cables. They take up a lot less room and are easier to manage than the large and awkward IDE.

I always hated trying to manage IDE cables. I can't tell you how many times I was putting together a machine and when it was all said and done there was full tension on one IDE cable.

That looks like it'd work. If you're not comfortable messing around with it, and don't want the hassle, you can just take it to a PC repair shop, and they can transfer everything pretty easily

do it!

That's OK. I'd rather they not touch my hacked software and prawns, thank you.

You could get a PCI Ultra ATA card like the ones that WD and maxtor used to bundle with their drives when the motherboards wouldn't support the higher speeds/capacities.