PATA to SATA change

[BrotherBear]

I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 which has two PATA hard drives that are small and slow. The computer has also a DVD Player and a CD Writer attached. It runs on Windows 7. What I would like to do is to replace the two PATA drives with two SATA II drives. The mobo has PCI slots so I bought a Promise SATA 300 TX2 Plus Controller Card which I installed (last BIOS and drivers) and which is listed in BIOS under Storage controllers as “Promise SATA Console SCSI Processor” and “Windows Promise SATA 300 TX2 plus IDE Controller”. To make things even more interesting, the first SATA II drive is an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (240GB). This is the drive I would like to use as the C drive. I was able to install it: it shows in Disk Management and in Windows Explorer as another storage unit, but I cannot make it the boot drive. When trying to install the system image on it the computer can’t find it, even if I remove both old PATA drives. Also, I have to mention that the BIOS has a feature named “Hard-Disk Drive Sequence” with two positions: (1) “System BIOS boot devices” and (2) “SATA300 TX2plus DO”. I tried to reverse the order, but then the system is restarting continuously, without actually completing the booting sequence. This is certainly not my main computer, but for the sake of the exercise, is there any solution to make this system able to “see” the SSD attached to the SATA controller as a bootable drive or should I go for an IDE-to-SATA II Device (like the one at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812240019)?

 

[RealBeast]

Such an old card, I'm surprised that you found Win7 drivers. I don't know if that card is bootable, I used a few long ago but never for a boot drive. If you want to boot from it you will at least need to load the driver early in the install when Windows asks for additional drivers, then it will have a chance to recognize the card and drive, otherwise the driver will load after boot up and it could not be the boot drive in that situation.

That adapter would work if you still cannot see the SSD after loading the driver during install.

 

[popatim]

The card is bootable but the OP is in the situation where they are trying to change the storage controller without reinstalling windows which complicates matters.

There is a sticky thread at the top of this forum that can guide you thru this process.

You cannot, as you've found, simply reboot off the ssd on the promise controller when the image thinks its on the motherbds ide port. Completely wrong drivers are being used.