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I have an ASUS P4S8X motherboard and have been running a 80GB IDE
drive (partitioned into C: and D: drives). I bought a SATA 200GB
drive thinking that I can run both tyeps of drives simultaneously,
keeping the IDE drive as my bootable drive running Windows XP. I have
headers on the motherboard for a primary UltraDMA 133 IDE, a secondary
UltraDMA 133 IDE, a primary ATA133, a primary SATA, and a secodary
SATA. The P4S8X manual says that I can run a RAID using both the ATA
IDE and the SATA drives together, but makes no mention of running the
UltraDMA133 IDE simultaneously with SATA.

I was hoping to run the SATA as an additional drive to store data on,
keeping the primary UltraDMA 133 as my boot device (so that I don't
have to spend the better part of a weekend building a new drive with
the OS and all my applications. Is there any hope for me?


Yes this is not a problem, my setup incorporates IDE drives and SATA drives,
as follows.

on PROMISE RAID (not VIA, obviously you'll have a P4 board equivalent)
SATA1 = 40GB Raptor (C
SATA2 = 200GB Maxtor (D

IDE Primary Master = 120GB Maxtor (E
IDE Secondary Master / Slave = DVD and DVD/RW

In my case I use the SATA 1 for boot up, which requires the driver disk
during the windows install process. It is important to set up the Array for
the SATA drive in the RAID BIOS though or the drive won't be seen by windows
(check your manual). I connect my SATAs to the PROMISE RAID, and not the VIA
(you'll have an equivalent P4 board RAID option I expect) as the Promise
RAID supports RAID 0+1, which allows me to have the drives seen seperately.
I would install the drive on the Promise RAID if it were me, once installed
and setup, it's a matter of drivers, then partioning and formatting in
windows.

But if I can run my setup, I don't see any reason why you can't run yours!

Cheers