If I install xp with a ata66 IDE cable can I switch to an ata133 ide cable?

[treepop]

See I am at home and one of those drives in my sig well died :(....my puter fell and it broke the drive....so I have no ata133 ide cable at home and was wondering if I used a ata33 or some old ide drive will that somehow save in my settings and I wont get the full potential of my ata100 WD 120 drive? thanks a ton for the help :)

[Andyman902042]

If the harddrive runs at Ultra DMA 33 then it can use a 40 wire cable, no problem. If your hardrive runs at Ultra DMA 66 or above and you want to use a 40 wire cable, then you'll have to go into BIOS and limit it to Ultra DMA 33 (a.k.a. Ultra DMA 2).

BIOS can detect slower interfaces on drives but AFAIK it cannot detect the different type cables. Anyway if you use 80 wire cable then you don't have to worry about anything.:)

I Hope that helps,
Andy

[treepop]

I installed XP and didnt make any changes in the bios. So I suppose the cable was ata66 or higher, I was just worried I would have to reinstall AGAIN to get my drives true potential......sigh I will miss my Raid 0 and my 120 gig hd that died :(....thanks for the help :)

[JigPu]

The BIOS won't be able to detect the different kind of cable, but if there's too much interferance (which the extra 40 ground wires in an ATA66/100/133 cable reduce) it will automatically decrease the speed of your drive down to where no errors occur while transfering data.

Besides, you wouldn't need to reinstall Windows to force it to redetect that kind of thing. If you remove the Primary or Secondary IDE controler from the Device Manager, Windows is forced to redetect the drive (and appropriate speed settings) on the next reboot.

JigPu

[treepop]

so I suppose I should hope that the IDE cable was at least an ata66 drive.....right?.....so if I see it redetecting the HardDrive then that probably means it was a ata33 IDE cable.....sorry I am in the middle of class right now and have to pay attention to the prof....thanks again :)

[Tebore]

There are only 2 types of cables. 40 Pin 40 wire aka ATA33 UDMA 2 cable. And then there's ATA 66,100,133 UDMA 4,5,6 40 pin 80wire cable. If you used a ATA66 cable it's the same as ATA133.