[Parasudda]

Hi, I've read some of the threads with more or less the same topic, but still have trouble. So, the problem:

I bought a new computer with a motherboard, ASRock K8 Combo-Z, which supports both SATA and IDE. The set up came as follows:

SATA 1: 200GB Sata harddisk
IDE Primary: empty
IDE Secondary: DVD Rom (master), DVD-RW (slave)

After installing windows and all the drivers etc the system worked perfectly.

Until............

I tried to install my old IDE harddrive (IBM Deskstar DTLA-307045, from previous computer) into the primary ide slot on the new motherboard. The harddisk never had any problems on the older computer. But the system then keeps rebooting and checking for errors on the disks (which takes a while) then reboots add infinitum warning of problems with hardware.

So..........
I've read a lot of threads from people with the same sort of problem and tried pretty much everything under the sun. Including switching the old hard disk to secondary ide.......switching between master and slave. The bios always recognises these changes. And in bios I have Disabled the IBM harddisk under the Boot menu....tried all sorts of Boot sequences, but NOTHING doing!!!

Please note that the older disk (IBM) does have a previous copy of Windows XP (legal) installed on it (and there's just one partition). I realise that this could be the problem but can't erase/format the disk since it contains all my valuable documents (some of which I've backed up to CDs, but not all).

The system always works fine if I take out the IDE harddisk. On two occasions, the system did startup properly and showed the IDE harddisk as D drive. But it wouldn't let me copy the files from Documents and Settings to the new SATA drive (C) "Access Denied"......though I had no problem copying the program files. So, this is maybe the second question: why not????
The first question being, what the hell is going on????

Any help appreciated.

Polkudda