hard drive issues

[tef]

new in here so bare with me,
i just built my first pc
the mobo has both sata and ide sockets
i used an new 80gb ide drive to install the os-all ok.
then i bought a 500 gb sata drive for storage- bios found it ok ,device manager found it ok-couldnt be found in my computer- not ok
i then re-installed windows onto sata drive - and re-formatted ide drive everything aok.
i then tried to install my old hard drive with lots of my files on it into the pc on the ide channel,it was a slave drive in the old pc and its gonna be a slave in this one but the pc wouldnt boot with it installed ,take it out boots fine.
if the mobo recognises the sata drive as master as one of the other threads stated,is it not possible to have two slave ide drives?
where did i go wrong ? any help would be appreciated as its doin my fruit and the drive im trying to install has all my work files on it which i use every day.... or used to :(

[shyster]

More infomation and clearer sentence structure make things easier to understand.

From what I gather you have:

One 500gb sata drive, with os loaded on.
One 80gb ide drive, new
One 80gb ide drive, with all your old files on it, which is also currently set to slave.

So your main objective is to transfer the 80gbs of data from the old ide to the new sata? Or are you just trying to get the computer to run with all three drives? Also does your old 80gb drive with all your data on it have an os running on it? Just wondering because that could also create some conflicts.

Firstly I would say no you cannot have two IDE drives set to slave, one always has to be the master drive. For example if you have four IDE drives, then there are two masters and two slaves, each one assigned to its own ribbon. The far end of the ribbon is usually for the master drive, and the connection in the middle of the ribbon is usually for the slave drive.

Also just for clarification sata drives are always masters, so if you had four sata drives they would all be master drives.

Until you answer my questions and give more info that is probably the best I can do to help you. Hope it works.

[tef]

thanks very much for the reply that did clear a couple of things up for me.building computers can be a steep and expensive learning curve.
the pc i built is now up n running mighty fine albeit with the os on the drive i wanted for storage,i have another matching sata drive and i am going to try setting up a raid 1 configuration. thanks again