Have you tried using the adapter with one of your PATA hard drives so you could use the PATA cable to connect your optical drive?
My experience with PATA to SATA adapters was that I had much better luck using the adapter to allow a PATA hard drive to use a SATA port than if I attempted to use a PATA optical drive with a SATA port. Sure, the adapaters always claimed that they supported ATAPI, but this seemed to be more along the lines of "it sorta works most of the time".
Of course, this was a few years ago so my perspective may be out of date.
EDIT 2 I've had this problem in the past when I used the adapters on my HDDs. It was messing up my backup because it wouldn't detect my HDDs,
Maybe you've just got a "bad" adapter? These adapters are pretty much a lowest manufacturing cost commodity item these days so I never have any idea how to differentiate them other than trial and error.
FWIW, my own personal preference has been for the more compact (IMO) dongle type such the one in the image below. Note: IMO you need to attach some form of electrical insulation so the exposed connectors on the back don't short out if they touch the metal of the drive case.
FWIW here are links to two supposedly different but probably identical (except for price/packaging) flavors of this dongle at one generic online retailer. Link 1 and Link 2.
yup, that's the one that I have.
Well, then I guess I've pretty much got nothing else useful to suggest dongle-wise. ;-)
Have you already tried different BIOS settings, IDE versus AHCI, for the SATA port(s)?
Windows 7 includes support for AHCI and I think that Win 7 will automagically install the AHCI drivers the first time you boot after setting AHCI in the BIOS. (If Win 7 doesn't figure it out and you don't want to waste time messing with it, just switch your BIOS back to IDE and you should be back where you were.)
I notice that there is apparently a setting in the Asus P5Q-E BIOS for IDE Detect Timeout
. You might want to check to make sure this is set to the max (35 seconds). This is supposed to be the default, but never hurts to check again.
One other way you could probably get around this is to buy an inexpensive PATA or PATA/SATA combo PCI controller adapter. You could probably get a PATA one relatively cheap
on eBay (or such). Things to keep in mind when going this route are:
- Not all PCI controllers allow booting from the device attached to them. You have to research this before you buy.
- It can take longer to boot. I have a Promise PATA/SATA combo PCI controller in my GA-965P-DS3. It takes maybe an extra 10 to 20 seconds for the PCI adapter to decide what devices are connected to it and whether or not it is going to install a BIOS extension.