install SATA HD in 8 year old computer?

[Asian Fury]

I've got an 8 year old home built computer with a failing HD. Being so old, all is has is a P-ATA connections. Almost no one sells P-ATA HD's anymore and I certainly can't find a deal on one.

My question is: if I buy a PCI SATA adapter and a SATA HD, can I boot from and install windows on that drive? The motherboard of course has no native SATA support.


Thanks for any responses.

 

[450]

I bought a PATA to SATA adapter on eBay for $4 shipped and now my SATA HDDs work fine with my Pentium 3! I can even boot from it.

 

[Asian Fury]

Thanks!

 

[450]

The only thing I don't like about those PATA to SATA adapters is that they take a while to get to you.

My last few adapters took 2-3 weeks. So try to find a US based item, should be a bit more but its worth it IMO.

 

[plugwash]

Almost no one sells P-ATA HD's anymore

Really? my experience over here in the UK is that nearly every computer parts vendor still carries them and looking through a few US vendors the same seems to apply there.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...DeactivatedMark=False&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20
http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drives-I...93964,n:541966,n:193870011,n:1254762011,k:IDE
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?Recs=10&Nav=|c:134|&Sort=4

Yes you pay a lot more per gigabyte than for SATA drives but still for under $50 you can get 160GB. Realistically are you going to be doing anything on a machine of that age that needs more storage than that.

My question is: if I buy a PCI SATA adapter and a SATA HD, can I boot from and install windows on that drive?

From the BIOS's point of view there is really no difference between booting from a SATA card and booting from a SCSI card so unless your bios vendor really fucked up it should be fine.

Note that if you go down that route you will almost certainly need to either use a F6 floppy or slipstream.