Sata Hard Drive & IDE Adapter to IDE Mobo

Hello,

I have just bought a job lot of spare harddrives (all 250gb) for my IDE mobo computer to use as additional storage and found they are SATA's. I have now got hold of some adapters to convert the SATA drives so they will fit onto my IDE ribbon cable. I then removed my 80gb IDE drive to check the new drives were OK. I plugged the first Sata drive into the ribbon cable using the adapter and it registered in the BIOS and I had to reload XP SPII (as expected) onto it. When I tried to reboot, the computer said please insert operating system disk, but the BIOS could still see the new drive - I gather from these forum pages that my motherboard needs new drivers to boot from the sata drive which I'm not bothered about yet as I really want to use my 80gb IDE drive as the primary and the Sata drives as extra storage. I have replaced the IDE as the master drive and the sata as the slave but on reboot only the sata is seen in the BIOS and again the computer won't boot from the sata drive without the windows disk - I'm not doing that and risking losing data or blowing something up, so I took the sata out rebooted the computer and it started fine, I then tried to plug in the sata (into the ide cable) while the computer was on (risky & stupid, I know) and the computer froze. I removed the sata drive and the computer started working again, so I turned it off - have now removed the sata drive from the case and I am writing here for help.

How can I get the Sata drive (with IDE adapter) to work on the same ribbon cable as the IDE drive. Please re-read my story again before posting a reply.

thanks - Paul