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Power Supply on my PC just exploded: i'll be mostly offline this week crying

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app103:
It's reasons like this that I went for EIDE drives and not SATA. I want to be able to pop them in my other pc if I have to.-app103 (April 27, 2007, 05:31 AM)
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speaking of which, is there a IDE to SATA converter? so that i can the use the older IDE drives on newer motherboards..
-lanux128 (April 27, 2007, 05:52 AM)
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I use a card like this one to use them in the newer pc. You can connect 4 drives to this. (2 cards and you can have 8!) There is also an Ultra 133 available, and I used to have that, but I had to swap cards with my dad when I couldn't get it to work on this pc. His card Ultra 100 card worked fine though.

Carol Haynes:
f0dder, you mean something like this: IDE Hard Drive to SATA port Converter? i don't need an enclosure because i already use one..

btw, thanks Carol for pointing out the terms.. i didn't know IDE is now known as PATA.. :o
-lanux128 (April 27, 2007, 06:46 AM)
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Yep - thats the sort of thing I meant - but app103's PCI card is a good solution if you have a PCI slot - and probably cheaper if you want more than a couple of drives. I presume the PCI card will run normal ATAPI optical drives too.

Check out http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-ATA133

app103:
Yep - thats the sort of thing I meant - but app103's PCI card is a good solution if you have a PCI slot - and probably cheaper if you want more than a couple of drives. I presume the PCI card will run normal ATAPI optical drives too.
-Carol Haynes (April 28, 2007, 04:39 AM)
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Yes, they do...but I am not sure if you can boot from one that is hooked up to it...never tried that. I have never tried booting from any device hooked up to one. I guess that's something for me to experiment with at some point.

Carol Haynes:
You should be able to boot from it - but I'd guess it depends on your BIOS settings (may be worth a look if it doesn't work immediately as there are settings to allow PCI cards to respond to the BIOS)

app103:
You should be able to boot from it - but I'd guess it depends on your BIOS settings (may be worth a look if it doesn't work immediately as there are settings to allow PCI cards to respond to the BIOS)
-Carol Haynes (April 28, 2007, 04:50 AM)
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The Ultra 100 card has it's own BIOS. At a point late in the booting up process, the card will detect and list all devices attached to it. Until that happens, those devices don't really exist on your system.

If you wanted to boot from an optical drive that is hooked up to the card, and it's the only optical device on the system, setting in the system BIOS to boot from a 'non-existing' optical device may not work. And you don't have access to anything in the card's BIOS.

This is why I was unsure if it could be done. It may also depend on the card too. Maybe newer cards are better and will allow you to do more. Mine is kind of old. Of the 2 cards that my father and I have, my Ultra 133 card was the newer one...purchased in 2001...and I swapped that for his older Ultra 100 card.

The drivers for the Ultra 100 can be installed from within Windows.

The Ultra 133 card required you to have a floppy drive to install the drivers during first boot. I had a floppy drive on the pc it was originally purchased for, but I don't have a floppy drive on this pc. On the older pc I originally had it in, that card detected and listed the devices attached to it early in the boot process, right after the listing of the drives attached directly to your system. I think that card would have better luck with booting from a device attached to it than the Ultra 100 would.

Like I said...something to experiment with some day.

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