Will a 500 mb Sata drive operate in an 'old' HP Pavilion puter?

[copas]

The HDD failed in the HP. I see there are available adapters to connect SATA drives to IDE machine.
I have all the hardware and am curious about just what to anticipate.
Ivan Copas

[Geek-9pm]

Did you already post his?
Low cost compatible IDE drive are available everywhere.
If the motherboard was not made for SATA, it may or may not work. Yes, t any old motherboard that does NOT have SATA is very, ,  very old and  is not compatible.

[copas]

Is this because the old bios is incompatable or something else?

[Geek-9pm]

The old BIOS does not know some things changed. The SATA is a newer spec and some of the old  IDE commands may not work.
One issue is the 48 bit LBA standard now used by machines made more recently.
For IDE drives under 127GB it is not an issue.