PCA Forums

I decided to just go SATA all the way instead of replacing just one IDE to SATA. Especially since my work is going to pay for it. Heh heh. Got two WD 250 gig (16 meg cache) hdd's on it's way to me now. Should have them by Friday. Now I'm trying to get my game plan in my head how I'm going to transfer all my data from both old IDE drives to new SATA drives.

I am going to first want to copy that first IDE drive with XP on it to the new SATA. Then I'm going to want to do the same process copying the second IDE (no OS) to the second SATA.

Any pointers?

Assuming you're not running RAID or some other unusual situation, it's fairly straight forward.

Use a disk cloning app like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, or (if they're retail drives) whatever disk comes with the drives from the manufacturer should have a cloning app.

To avoid problems I would ONLY do the boot drive by itself first (sometimes Windows gets it into it's head to reverse drive letters). Add the 2nd drive later once you've got your boot drive working.

If you're lucky, you MAY be able to just boot up from the new clones SATA drive and you're good to go. However sometimes Windows won't be able to find the new drive because it occupies a different physical address and you'll get a BSOD after the Windows logo comes up. If so, you'll need to run a repair install of WindowsXP: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Be aware you'll need to re-install all your drivers and Windows updates afterwards.

Also be aware your mobo may require a special SATA driver (most SATA controllers in modern mobos are recognized by WinXP SP2 unless it's a RAID controller). If so, the repair install won't detect any drives. If that happens you need to copy your SATA drivers to a floppy (must be a floppy) and press F6 when prompted when the XP installer first runs to "install additional SCSI or other controller drivers".

Oh, also, make sure that your BIOS is configured to boot from the first SATA drive.

Hope this helps...