PCA Forums

I currently have a P4 system with an 80 GB SATA hard drive. I am planning on upgrading the system with more RAm (1 GB), a new video card, and a larger hard drive. Once the new hard drive is installed,
I plan on using the 80 GB hard drive as a slave drive. The 80 GB drive is currently partianed into eight 10 GB drives.

My questions:

Is it possible to set up an Serial ATA drive as a slave drive?

Do I need to wipe out the C:\ drive on the 80 GB drive before it can be set up as a slave drive.

Once the 80 GB drive is installed as a slave, will I be able to access the existing data on the remaining partians on the drive? (I've got a bunch of data on that drive that I don't want to lose and would hate to have to burn all that data to CDs to save it.)

Is there anything else I need to do besides setting the switch on the back of the drive to 'slave".

Thanks in advance for your assitance.

MAC

Yes you can use a SATA as a slave. There is no jumper like on a PATA drive - you just connect it to the slave cable.

No you don't need to wipe the C:\ partition on the existing drive.

Yes you will be able to access all the data on the old drive once it's connected as a slave.

There are two ways you can do this. If you don't want to re-install Windows you can "clone" the old drive to the new drive. If you buy a retail drive it will come with software to do this, or you can download it from the manufacturer. You can also use a 3rd party utility like Norton Ghost. The cloning utility will resize the partitions so they fill the new larger drive (Norton Ghost asks you to specify the size of the new drive's partitions).

Conversely you can install Windows clean on the new drive and then connect the old drive as a slave and copy your data. Remember that you cannot copy programs only data.

Thank you very much FP. I really appreciate the help you have given me and other on this forum.

Old Farts Rule!!

Edit 10-21-05 9:15 PM) - I've got the new hard drive installed and have installed XP. No problems so far. Tomorrow I'll install the old hard drive and clean up the partitians I can no longer use.

MAC