[SOLVED] Botting a SATA mobo using an IDE drive

[DumbHammerMechanic]

Hello all.

Looking to resurrect an old machine for occasional gaming use. Willing to spend close to zero money, as this is just a time killer while it snows and I'm broke. I had an Asus 478 socket P4 board (Asus P4V8X-X) that died on me while trying to boot. A friend gave me something that is like 12 gens newer. So now I have a ATX micro Mobo that is SATA only, with the chip, fan and RAM. But my HDD with win7 and all my old games is an IDE drive, with no IDE ports on the Mobo. I have found a few threads (one on here) that says I can use an IDE/SATA converter to boot from, but I have read a negative review in nearly every adapter on Amazon that someone tried just that and failed. I'm cheap, but willing to pop the $20 to get my old IDE drive to boot and run, assuming someone actually did it and succeeded.

I know the easy button is a $40 SATA drive and a clean install, but I have literally 80 games from the mid 2000's already installed and I doubt I have even half of the discs/files to reload them. Plus I tweaked the <Mod Edit> out of my WIN7Ult install to make it sleek, fast and capable, and I don't remember now how I did it, or what I even did. Plus, several of these games wont even run on a clean Win10 install. Think AOEll or the OG Diablo.

So lets skip the "what you should do is.." and focus on the problem in isolation: Can I boot from an IDE HDD using a newer SATA only Micro ATX Mobo, and if so what (precisely with part #s of you fine people know them) do I need to do so?

Thanks for any input.

__J0N***

 

[rgd1101]

Can I boot from an IDE HDD using a newer SATA only Micro ATX Mobo,

no

 

[Paperdoc]

You can't do what you want, sorry. And it is NOT related to IDE versus SATA.

Every Windows Install is customized at the time it is first installed. The installation process takes a complete inventory of all the devices present in the system, then ensures that all the device drivers for them are loaded when Windows loads so it can run. Install does NOT copy absolutely everything from the Install disk, so most of the device drivers it has are NOT loaded onto the boot drive. Moreover, for each device and its driver, Install makes appropriate entries into the Windows Registry so it knows where to find stuff and how the configuration is set. What many do not recognize is that any mobo has DOZENS of devices on the mobo, and they all need their drivers. These are in addition to any devices you have added, like cards in PCI slots. So what is already set up on that old IDE hard drive is all the device drivers and configuration info required for your OLD dead mobo. It is guaranteed that that Windows installed on the IDE drive does NOT have MOST of the drivers for the devices on that new mobo you got. So even if you get the IDE drive connected, the machine can NOT boot into your old well-tuned Win 7 OS.