Hi. I have taken out my sata hard drive and swapped it for an ide hard drive. I formatted the disk with acer recovery fine, now when the pc starts it says error reading disk. I cannot understand this. My work FLOW is as follows: I took away the sata drive and cables found a ide ribbon cable with THREE connectors one to the board, the second to the ide hard drive set as master and the third to the dvd, set as slave. Can anyone please shed some light why the pc refuses to load windows. Perhaps there is a cmos/ bios setting i need to change. Any help greatly appreciated with regards.

The system is an acer desktop aspire T180
MB=========================Slave========Master.

Or you can try temporarily DISCONNECTING the optical drive to see if it works.

Is there an OS installed on this drive ? ?
If so was it installed on that drive when it was in the Acer ? ?

This can cause issues if it's from ANOTHER machine where Windows was installed....THANKS for your prompt reply. Yes i took out the the dvd drive cable and restarted but the same disk error message. Yes I formatted and reinstalled vista on the drive while in the Acer machine. Any more thoughts please.Check the boot order in the BIOS...should be floppy; CDROM; HDD....

Make sure the SATA is disconnected for now.
The SATA will have to be moved to SATA 3 or 4 slot to ignore the boot options...ok i will try the boot order now, can you explain SATA will have to be moved to SATA 3 or 4 slot to ignore the boot options... how do i do this pleaseCheck your MBoard manual for SATA plug designations...if it's in SATA1 it will still try to boot to that drive.unfortunately I don't have a manual. I have been through the bios looking for away to disable or change the sata setting but cant seem to find anything there. I just reloaded bios defaults but to no avail also. I might try to format again and reinstall vista using my wifes disk, just in case the acer disk has gone pear shaped.
What machine is this ? ?
Most manuf. have the manuals available as a FREE DLoad...
Usually in .PDF format so if you don't have Adobe Reader installed DLoad and install Foxit Reader...also FREE.ok thanks i will look for it.
Got it, it was a faulty ide ribbon cable. Who would of thought that.............Thanks againThat was going to be my next suggestion....nice work !

Have you managed to re-introduce the SATA drive without issues ? ?Thanks for your help patio. Yes no issues, the sata drive just plug and play and establishes itself. Excellent ! !

And Welcome Aboard !