sata drive not getting drive letter in XP

[joshd]

yes, its south west britain. lots of beaches.

yea, i was the same, i came onto TF looking for answers for a problem, and i have been addicted ever since... good ol' TF. lol
i ran i google search looking for "tech computer forums", TF was the first on the list, and well, here i am.

 

[decaman]

that's cool! yeah, i plan on staying. good to be in touch w/ folks such as yourself.

i enjoyed my stay in cornwall -- close to penzance. nice people, good times. beautiful at the very tip to the ocean!

 

[timmer]

well im glad u could get ur sata drive to work cause i couldnt mix sata with pata at the same time soo ur one lucky mother

 

[joshd]

whats pata? i know sata is serial-ata, but what is ata also?

 

[decaman]

just curious about why you were having a problem. i did this:
i installed a SATA host card so i could attach the SATA drive. i did this via a spare PCI slot. this means it did not take up a spot on the ribbon, even if i could find an IDE-to-SATA converter, which exists but which i dont like. so, that takes care of the SATA install (ignoring the issues above).

my new spare storaage is the PATA drive, a maxtor. i didnt know what PATA was either, but it says it on the back of the drive. to install that, i just made it the secondary on the ribbon and set it to slave.

that PATA drive is the one i saved all of my at-risk data to from the SATA drive. it's 200gb, and will remain in my computer.

 

[decaman]

oh. Parallel ATA = PATA. PATA's just the previous standard, the stuff IDE is on.

Duh.

Serial ATA, SATA.

http://www.seagate.com/products/consumer_electronics/consumer_electronics_interfaces.html

 

[joshd]

oh right. thanks for the link decaman.

 

[decaman]

it didnt post my "duh, *me*, not you" add-on.

 

[joshd]

lol