I never thought about this until now.
My plethora of collected hard drives are ALL IDE.
I have 3 computers, all with IDE drives, and want to transfer all of them over to SATA.
I will either use Partition Magic or Ghost to do the transfers, but:

Can I have 1 IDE Hard Drive (Master) connected and 1 SATA Hard Drive (Slaved) at the same time. Or is this system specific? I.e. dependent upon BIOS, motherboard maker?

There's no such thing as master/slave for SATA. It is BIOS/MB specific as to how many of each you can have connected. Most MBs will allow as many SATA as you have connections for, and at least 2 IDE.

I never thought about this until now.
My plethora of collected hard drives are ALL IDE.
I have 3 computers, all with IDE drives, and want to transfer all of them over to SATA.
I will either use Partition Magic or Ghost to do the transfers, but:

Can I have 1 IDE Hard Drive (Master) connected and 1 SATA Hard Drive (Slaved) at the same time. Or is this system specific? I.e. dependent upon BIOS, motherboard maker?

This shouldn't be a problem at all. However, depending on how the boot process sees the order of the controllers, you might have an issue if you have already installed XP, and are adding a new second drive.

THANKS ALL.

This shouldn't be a problem at all. However, depending on how the boot process sees the order of the controllers, you might have an issue if you have already installed XP, and are adding a new second drive.

I just need the two connected to do the transfer.
Once the transfer is done, the IDE's get tossed.
If I use Ghost, I'll never see WinXP, I'll work from a boot-cd.

I just need the two connected to do the transfer.
Once the transfer is done, the IDE's get tossed.
If I use Ghost, I'll never see WinXP, I'll work from a boot-cd.

You still might need to make changes to the BOOT.INI file, since the drive that XP will now boot off of will be on a different controller. The help file with Ghost should explain how to do this. It's also been a while since I've worked with Ghost, so maybe there is an automated way to do this now.

I'll give you a sidebar while I'm at it:

Is SATA 3.0 backwards compatible with SATA150?
I just noticed that my motherboards are SATA150.

I'll give you a sidebar while I'm at it:

Is SATA 3.0 backwards compatible with SATA150?
I just noticed that my motherboards are SATA150.

Yep. You really won't be missing that much of a speed difference anyway between the two.

You should be able to Ghost an IDE with Windows XP onto your new SATA HD and not have any problems with XP on the new drive. I did this over a year ago with my boot IDE, Ghosted it to my Sata and have not had any problems. My Sata is now the boot drive, and the IDE is put away for safe keeping, just in case I need it again.

I never thought about this until now.
My plethora of collected hard drives are ALL IDE.
I have 3 computers, all with IDE drives, and want to transfer all of them over to SATA.
I will either use Partition Magic or Ghost to do the transfers, but:

Can I have 1 IDE Hard Drive (Master) connected and 1 SATA Hard Drive (Slaved) at the same time. Or is this system specific? I.e. dependent upon BIOS, motherboard maker?

If you have both connectors on your motherboard, shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure to set the boot drive in BIOS. You would set the IDE (or PATA) drive to cable select.