IDE Hard Drive Question

Hey guys I got a ProStar Laptop with:
D900T Mobo
3.6GHZ P4HT
2 Gigs of Ram
A 40 Gig IDE HD (Toshiba)
and all the other stuff thats not important.

I believe its the prostar 9098. I had a question about the hard drive. When I boot the laptop is claiming there is a SATA 378 controller, but when I opened it up there is an IDE drive inside. And the drive had a 44 to 50 pin cable coming off what seems either the mobo or some card? Any1 have any idea on this...my first experience with a laptop and I am a bit lost.

-Jake

 

it could very well be that your laptop has a SATA controller on it, but it's not in use or something like that. it would be very odd, but maybe they even used an IDE to SATA adapter inside the laptop. that wouldn't make much sense from my standpoint, as those adapters are rather expensive!

how about you go and check your HDD info in Device Manager and then compare it against what something like PC Wizard 2008 found @ www.cpuid.com says.

 

I would love to do that only one problem...I fear either my hard drive or my cable has gone bad. When I post to BIOS it seems to detect a SCSI card, while when I boot the screen clearly states SATA 378 IDE OK. I took the hard drive out and it for sure is a Toshiba 40gigger that is a 44 pin IDE drive...only thing is the IDE cable changes from a 44 pin at the drive to a 50 pin at the mobo/sata card? I know the 50 pin IDE is used for CD-roms...why would it be used here...also if I buy a 44 pin cable and plug it into the 50 pin slot would the drive still work? Based on the pinouts the extra 4 pins should all be power and they would never run to the drive anyway right? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

This is the cable that was in the laptop hope its not detected as spam.: http://ztronics.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=40_65&products_id=307

Am really lost here and trying to repair my laptop!

 

any1 got any clues??