Reporting back on cheap PATA to SATA converters bought on eBay fromHong Kong

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack

I paid less than $10 for four of these puppies, delivered, including
four SATA cables and adapters to convert four-wire IDE power connectors
to four-wire floppy connectors to power the PATA to SATA converters.

These adapters allow connecting parallel drives to serial ports on the mb.

Conclusion: They work pretty good, but I noticed one minor glitch.

With a CDRW drive connected with one of these pups I was able to install
XP without a hitch, but I was not able to use the WD Data Lifeguard
Tools CD to partition, format, etc, but the XP disk does all that stuff.
The WD disk uses Caldera Dr. DOS to boot up. I am not sure if the
adapters were at fault or some other reason. I got the following:

Driver not found: generic

NWCDEX.EXE requires a driver name to be specified

Command or filename not recognized

It might be that this disc would not work in an SATA CD drive, but I
don't know. This WD disk was shipped before SATA drives existed. The
disk DID boot through the IDE connector on the mother board, so the disk
is okay.

After I installed XP with the C: drive connected to the IDE connector on
the MB I reconnected the C: drive to an SATA port through the cheap
adapter and the system booted up and ran with no problems.

On these WD drives these adapters prefer no jumpers, which is how WD
says they should be configured when using them as a single drive on a
dual IDE channel

That's all folks
 
I paid less than $10 for four of these puppies, delivered, including
four SATA cables and adapters to convert four-wire IDE power connectors
to four-wire floppy connectors to power the PATA to SATA converters.

These adapters allow connecting parallel drives to serial ports on the mb.

Conclusion: They work pretty good, but I noticed one minor glitch.

With a CDRW drive connected with one of these pups I was able to install
XP without a hitch, but I was not able to use the WD Data Lifeguard
Tools CD to partition, format, etc, but the XP disk does all that stuff.
The WD disk uses Caldera Dr. DOS to boot up. I am not sure if the
adapters were at fault or some other reason. I got the following:

Driver not found: generic

NWCDEX.EXE requires a driver name to be specified

Command or filename not recognized

It might be that this disc would not work in an SATA CD drive, but I
don't know. This WD disk was shipped before SATA drives existed. The
disk DID boot through the IDE connector on the mother board, so the disk
is okay.

After I installed XP with the C: drive connected to the IDE connector on
the MB I reconnected the C: drive to an SATA port through the cheap
adapter and the system booted up and ran with no problems.

On these WD drives these adapters prefer no jumpers, which is how WD
says they should be configured when using them as a single drive on a
dual IDE channel

That's all folks
Click to expand...
Generally you dont want to use those IDE to SATA adapters with optical disks.
They are meant for Hard disks.
 
Generally you dont want to use those IDE to SATA adapters with optical disks.
They are meant for Hard disks.
Click to expand...

Yep -- sounds reasonable for horse shoes with hand grenades. Have some
little adapters in their boxes I haven't tried on old PATA, 3 or 4
Seagate 200/250M units, built back in Seagate's better days. Going on
eight years old -- throw those non-SeaSnakes from the porch to street
and they're guaranteed to still work. One of which, back in early INT
13H addressing schemes, came packaged w/ a PCI Promise dedicated
controller for controller contingencies. Controller City here -- ASUS
MB, alone w/ 3 controller chipsets -- IDE, SATA/RAID, as well another
controller IDE chipset, though I forget exactly what it does. MB's
earlier SATA compliance for most newer drives it won't recognize.
Plus that PATA Promise and another Syba SATA -- both PCI. Actually,
Kludge City, depending on id-ing drivers and the BIOS config.

Anyway, the PCI controllers will work with optical drives, though
specifically stated that they're not so intended. Same deal w/ boot/
driver issues -&- BIOS (need be on a correct MB port, driver & BIOS
settings, to boot optically). But, while running up to 4 DVDs, who
cares. . . well, until the crashes come. Nasty ones. First power on
to boot, it's OK. Do all the work I need with mass copying on 4 DVDs,
although later on, best watch out. If the computer is left running
weeks on end, and I go to say NERO, or just to access a DVD drive --
POW, system just may reset itself.

Did that one time with a 1T formatted NTFS connected via a USB port.
Crashed, hosed the HD, which took a week with some good data recovery
software (which only operates at a rudimentary command level or Safe
Boot) for regaining a lost NTFS drive. I still "push it," but always
now from a clean hard boot, if not OS restoration, no NTFS if
possible, and fully powered down, so the optical drives can "settle
in." Carefully, being out of specs, and never randomly accessing
opticals after the system has been up long enough to lay its
minefield. Couple more boxes of DVDs to move and I'll be and back to
normal. Done and won't need to Promise anymore.
 
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