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On 23/04/13 13:11, Neil Winchurst wrote: > Recently I have been trying to find a use for my old desktop computer. > Then I found that the original DVD drive is not working properly. One > of our members, David Bell, has kindly given me a replacement drive. > > Today I have had a look inside the box. I find that the fittings at > the back of each drive are quite different so I am now a bit lost. I > have always concentrated on software up to now and kept well away from > the hardware. > > Is it possible/likely that the new drive is not compatible with my old > computer? Or is there some way to get it working which is beyond my > very limited (read non-existent) capabilities? > > Any suggestions please? > > Neil > Hi Neil, I'm going to guess that you have one SATA interface and one PATA/IDE interface in play here: your PC is older so it probably has the older (and now relatively obsolete) IDE interface, whereas your replacement drive probably has a newer SATA type interface. It could of course be the other way around though. Have a look at the pics on these two wiki pages so you know which is which: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ata The two won't play together nicely I'm afraid, although it's entirely possible your PC actually has both types of connectors on it's motherboard. If you're not sure, let us know your motherboards make/model and we can google it to check. I've got stacks of both IDE and SATA DVDs lying around, I pulled several out of a dead machine just yesterday - getting them to you might be a problem though as I'm too lazy to travel :] Do you know if your old PC supports booting from a USB thumb drive? It's really a lot easier than arsing about with DVDs anyway. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq