Uninstall hard drive

[rdb]

I have a 5 year old Dell D8100 with ATA 100 interface for a Maxtor 5T060H6 hd. I recently installed a SATA controller in a PCI slot and installed a SATA drive (Maxtor 7L300S0) and formatted and installed Win XP Pro and I now boot to this drive. However, I don't know how to remove the IDE hd. Since it is connected as the master via the IDE cable, how do I uninstall it. I know I'm booting to the new drive, but occasionally the old hd turns on and runs for a while until it times out because I've told the system to turn off hd's after 15 min. The drive seems fine, except it is showing its age by making a whirring sound as well as it seems to slow down and speed up sometimes. I plan on building a new system in the next year, and didn't want to spend money on another IDE drive, only to replace it with a SATA drive a few months from now.

This may be a simple problem for someone, but I'm still learning about hardware and have not been able to find out anything over the internet. Does the IDE cable settings have to be changed? I have the hd plugged into the IDE0 & a floppy, DVD player & CD burner into IDE1 as it came 5 year ago. Do I uninstall the hd in device manager, or is there another way?

I have tried to give all relevant info, but if I missed something, please let me know. I welcome any help on this matter. Thanks!
/me

[IT-Guy]

If you have your pc set to boot to the SATA drive, then just turn it off remove the IDE Drive from the computer all together (unless you want to keep it in there for extra storage).  If for some reason you want to keep it in there and just disable it... you can go into the BIOS and turn off just the primary IDE controller and even unplug the power to the drive so it doesn't spin up.  Although.. if you're not going to use it.. just take it out.

[rdb]

Thanks for that suggestion, but it does not work. I should have gone into that before, but I had already tried disconnecting the drive. but somehow the bios is still wanting to see it. I tried turning primary drive off in bios and it wont boot up. My new drive is set to boot, and it is set as drive C, w/ the old drive as H. Everything I've tried in bios won't work. Any other ideas...?

Yes I can leave it in, but with the whirring...I'd rather not. It's not real bad, but there's got to be a way!

What would happen if I disabled or uninstalled this drive in device manager?