Rich,
I've used that adapter. It's good for plugging in old IDE CD/DVD drives into SATA devices. It's not good for the other way around. I have used this adapter with a WiebeTech SATA Forensic DriveDock to read IDE hard drives with a write blocker, but that's it.
The other way around (IDE to SATA) has major issues. Those devices are only designed for optical drives as well, and I have never gotten one to work right. Yes, I had one of those too.
Get a USB 2.0 external drive case which supports SATA drives. You'll be much happier.
You mentioned the words Compaq BIOS as well, or as I like to put it, a completely neutered and crippled one that may not support that SATA PCI card, and definitely won't support a SATA boot drive 100%. Heck, their BIOS setups have problems with USB boot drives.
Swap the drives
.
Mitch