help adding old parallel ata to new SATA comp

I have an old WD parallel ata hard drive that I want to add to a new computer with a SATA drive. I can't get it to boot up. I have tried everything my little brain can think of and just don't have the xp to get it right. The reason I want the old drive is because I don't want to have to transfer all my old data on to DVD's and reload it into my new computer. Any help is greatly appreciated

Just what is the problem? If you have the rig set up to boot to the SATA drive, you should be OK(meaning the OS should recognize the WD ATA drive), but if you want to boot to the WD, you will have to change BIOS settings. You might also have a problem with which file system is installed on either drive. If the old drive is FAT32, it may not be recognized in NTFS. Try a peek in Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Disk Management and see if the WD drive actually shows up.

The only thing that I can think of that hasn't been said by stool is check your master slave jumper on the ata hdd.

my old rig has a pata and a sata drive. I couldent get it to boot from sata .However when winxp was on the pata one and i installed sata hd after a fresh reformat on the pata one , it worked fine.

Did you go to the bios and set HDD priority?