Can I boot from a drive attached to a PATA to IDE converter?

Hey guys I have an 80gb SATA that I want to connect to an older Dell mobo by using this: PATA IDE TO SATA Adapter Converter Card For 3.5 HDD DVD - eBay, Adaptors, Components, Computers. (end time 19-Oct-10 13:29:22 AEDST)

Is it possible to boot from the sata drive connected to that on the dell mobo? Sorry I don't know the mobo's name, it just has only IDE connectors.

So is it even possible to boot from these converters? The SATA drive only has a pin configuration to turn the speed down for older mobos. No slave or master setting.

I'm assuming the old Mobo is using IDE? Not AHCI. So there shouldn't be any problems right?

Thanks lots for any speedy assistance.

Try it out. Connect it all up, then boot the machine up into BIOS.
If the drive is recognised, then chances are you can.
You'l need to set the boot order to be able to boot from the drive.
Good luck.

Thanks for your help. I'm going to try in an hour. I tried on my gigabyte ep31-ds3l and it just gave me 'A disk error occurred'. The device boots fine when connected to a Sata port on the mobo, as normal. But it gives me that error when connected to a IDE port through the connector..

I didn't bother checking to see if I was set to AHCI mode or not though and I didn't check to put the CD drive as the first boot device which apparently can skip any bs with the drive in a few cases.

Any other help is appreciated.

Hello,

IDE to PATA converters seldom work unless the BIOS supports at least UDMA 5.. and windows 7 will be dog slow with anything slower than UDMA 6 anyway regardless of what the rest of the hardware looks like.
You're better off getting an IDE HDD.

Thanks for the advice but the only IDE I have was damaged when partitioning and I don't know how to fix it I can see it as a slave and write things to it but it has the same 'A disk error occurred' error when I try to boot from it after reinstalling the OS. (OS installs fine just cant boot from it after).

Okay...
The IDE drive should still work.
Set the jumper to the master setting, remove any other HDDs, then try reinstalling, but before you click "install now," hit shift+10 to bring up the command prompt.
at each prompt, type the following:

• diskpart
• list disk
• sel disk 0
• clean all (this will erase and overwrite the entire HDD, zeroing it and will take a long time)
• exit

Then proceed with setup.

• click drive options
• create one partition
• delete the 100MB system reserved partition that windows creates
• continue with setup

I'd give it about an 80% chance of working acceptably if you're not getting disk errors because of failing sectors in the HDD provided you have a fast enough CPU, an good graphics card (Older agp cards don't work very well, however) and at least 1 GB of pc2700 ram or better

Thanks mate but it seems there is an error with the robotic arm of the drive.. so it has a mechanical error...
The old Mobo I am trying to connect to adapter to is an Optiplex GX270 Series A06, By Dell.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to see the drive at all.. so it's a total failure.
Thanks for your help everyone

Does anyone know where I can get a really cheap 80gb drive that works? An IDE one. I've tried Ebay but they've sent me 2 broken IDE drives so far... (from 2 different people) and I have pretty much gone off Ebay..

I live in Aust if that helps.

Sigh.. this is such a downer.

best place to get an IDE drive is a small local independent computer tech.. I have a stack of them in my shop, but unfortunately I live on the other side of the planet.