About 2 years ago i purchased a 250 gig external acomdata hard drive. it worked fine for the better half of the 2 years until one day, i returned to my dorm to find the led flashing blue and red, and it making a strange clicking noise. after much fooling around in the case of the drive i found that the 41 pin connection was broken, not on the drive itself but on the recieving end. looking at an old computer i realized that the drive could easily be put in a desktop. I connected the harddrive to my main PC along the same cable trackt as my DVD-RAM drive. while this worked to recive the information, thus assuring me of the hard drives fuctionality, it essentially turned my hard drive in to D: which was my DVD drive. i looked for a second area to connect the HDD cables but with my motherboard(M2N-SLIDeluxe) there are no more pins.

This brings me to my question: is there some sort of adapter to change 41 pin slot into the SATA connector?

If so any idea where to get one?

IDE/ATAPI connectors are usually 40-pin blocks (one of which can be a blank key resulting in 39 actual pins) - not 41.

IDE-to-SATA "bridge board" converters (http://www.satacables.com/html/sata-acessories.html) can be obtained.

It sounds as if there was only one connector on the cable to which the DVD drive was attached. If so it could be replaced with a cable with place for both a master and a slave device. On modern PCs (as SATA has become more commonplace) there may be none or only one IDE connector on the mobo in place of the more usually found two of recent years. If you need to connect more than two IDE/ATAPI devices then (leaving aside bootability problems) it is usually straightforward to add a PCI host controller card with additional sockets for IDE cables on them.

I would have thought that with a bit of searching you should be able to get a replacement short IDE cable to replace the broken one but another approach could be to get a USB-to-IDE converter cable instead of a whole enclosure.