Problems with New computer detecting old hard drive..

I think the old hd is underpowered and I believe this is what I need:

Newegg.com - AMC CSA-6 6" SATA Power Adapter, (15-Pin) to Power Supply (4-Pin) - Adapters & Gender Changers

DocBrown said:

That's the problem then. NO power to the adapter card & the HD.

The Connectors in the DELL are SATA only. We need a power adapter to convert SATA power to 4 pin Molex.

Thanks man, you've been a lot of help. I can't believe I pulled a rookie mistake like that haha. Oh well. I'll have to pick one up and I think I'll be on my way. :)

Update: Got my new power adapter harness from new egg. Plugged it all in, and still no go. I still have the Q drive, but as previously stated, is probably from Office 2010. I've tried both jumper settings on the adapter board, but nothing is working. Old HD is still set as a slave. I did notice however that the factory HD in the dell has jumper settings but no actual jumper, nor are any of the settings labeled Master, Slave, etc. I also went into BIOS and it wasn't finding the HD there either.

Plug and play can bite me haha. Any ideas guys? In the meantime, I'm going to try a different connection on the motherboard. Thanks again.... :)

Still can't get it working. I tried different slots on the motherboard, and none of them worked. About the only thing I didn't do physically with it is test the voltage coming out of the power supply.

What of my virtual Q drive from office 2010? Will that somehow block windows from seeing the hard drive? I already went into folder options and selected the option to show hidden system files/drives/etc. Still can't see it in BIOS either.

About at the end of my rope here, starting to think an external setup might be the way to go, but I really don't want to spend more money if I don't NEED to. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks for lookin...

DocBrown said:

Bob,

I used an adapter similar to yours but to go the other way from IDE on MB to a SATA HD.

I'm going to take a guess that your IDE HD needs to be set as master for this adapter board. Were there any instructions with it?

Instructions with...the adapter? There was, and it was in English, but the grammar was really bad, probably a bad translation? But there was no useful info in it. It basically just said "plug it in".

I didn't try setting the old hard drive to master yet. Just did it now though, and now the computer is detecting a Y drive? Still can't access it though.

Sigh Time for bed, have to work tomorrow, I'll mess around with it some more then. Thanks again for the help doc. :)