Can I install IDE drive in SATA machine

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My old XP machine died from some registry back-up program so I bought a new machine in hopes of recovering the data from the old 60 Mb IDE hard drive. I didn't think to check that the new machine has a SATA hard drive so I guess I have a cable problem connecting the old as a slave. Can I put in the old IDE as an optical drive? If so, do I need anything special? Thanks.
 
It will connect just fine. You don't put it as an optical drive, you just connect it to the single ide channel, how you do that is up to you. The only thing to be careful of is the jumper settings.

If there is only 1 device on the channel that is master, if there are 2 one has to be master and the other slave. Cable Select is also an option, but I don't recommend it.

I guess the other thing to watch is that your BIOS is set to boot off your sata drive and not whatever is connected to the IDE channel.
 
Thanks, worked just fine. And you were right, I did have to adjust the BIOS so that it booted from the correct drive. Now I need to find out how to remove XP (or thinking about running dual OS).
 
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