I have a dell which has a sata connection... But the hdd is bad... BUT, I have a brand new ide hdd! Is there a cable to fit the change because my bios will recognize the ide hdd.

Yes there are SATA to IDE converters, but it really depends on the application.

You'd be better of getting a correct SATA drive as they are not all that expensive anymore.

Except for the newest motherboards, most boards still have at least one primary ide connection on the board itself. If your PC has only one optical drive you can set the drive to be a slave and set your ide hard drive to master and have both on the one ribbon cable. If Dell in their infinite wisdom put a single connection cable on the ide for the optical drive, you would have to buy one that allows for two drives. The safest setup would be the optical drive on the middle connection (slave) and the hard drive at the terminating end (master). The problem is, its hard to find a cable with the distance between the middle and end connections that will make the jump from the top optical down to the hard drive. They do sell very long cables that have a greater distance between the two, but it's a shot in the dark until you get it home as to whether it will do the trick.

They also sell ide to sata conversion adapters that will allow you to plug it into your ide drive and then plug the sata power and data transfer cable to the adapter.

Here are two at new egg but you can also find them at stores near you:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812197005

And

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812240010