HDD Swap advice...

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lexcruiser

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
97
Currently running two IDE drives in my machine right now and want to switch both out for a single SATA drive. I have an ASUS P5AD2-E mobo w/ the integrated Sata interface.
What would be the easiest way to go about this?

My current plan:
Connect the new SATA drive to my machine (with the two IDE drives still connected), boot into Windows and 'Ghost' all partitions from the two IDE drives over to the SATA drive. If I do this, will the machine recognize the new SATA drive as the 'primary' after I disconnect the IDE's and boot up? I don't think I installed the SATA drivers yet on the mobo, but would it basically auto-detect the SATA drive once I have it connected? Anything I have to change in BIOS?

Also, the plan is to get the Maxtor Ultra16 250GB, 7200RPM (16MB cache) SATA for %$180. Good deal?

Any and all advise/suggestions would be great.
:)
 
Install the SATA drivers first, naturally.

I think this alone might prevent the "NTLDR not found" error since you're using the same motherboard.

Also, I suggest using Acronis True-Image to ghost the drive. I've never used it and not been able to fire up the new drive afterwards, where Ghost is rather hit or miss... especially when dealing with SATA.

You can download a free, working copy from Acronis
 
jonnyGURU said:
Install the SATA drivers first, naturally.

I think this alone might prevent the "NTLDR not found" error since you're using the same motherboard.

Also, I suggest using Acronis True-Image to ghost the drive. I've never used it and not been able to fire up the new drive afterwards, where Ghost is rather hit or miss... especially when dealing with SATA.

You can download a free, working copy from Acronis
Click to expand...

Are SATA drives tempermental when it comes to working w/ Ghost? I'm trying to cover all possible situations/problems before going ahead to do this. Any more info you can provide would be great.
Thanks again.
 
That's how I found out about Acronis True Image. I was trying to Ghost SATA drives. What's funny is, I wasn't even trying to go from IDE to SATA! I was trying to go from SATA to SATA and it said it made the copy and it didn't.

I used the demo version of Acronis True Image to duplicate an IDE drive to a SATA RAID-5 and then from SATA to SATA and from SATA to IDE... I was SOLD. I paid for it and now I can back up from any drive to an image and then from the image to any drive. It's KILLER software.
 
jonnyGURU said:
That's how I found out about Acronis True Image. I was trying to Ghost SATA drives. What's funny is, I wasn't even trying to go from IDE to SATA! I was trying to go from SATA to SATA and it said it made the copy and it didn't.

I used the demo version of Acronis True Image to duplicate an IDE drive to a SATA RAID-5 and then from SATA to SATA and from SATA to IDE... I was SOLD. I paid for it and now I can back up from any drive to an image and then from the image to any drive. It's KILLER software.
Click to expand...

Cool. Thanks for all the info man. I'll be sure to check it out.
 
That's not that good of a deal on that drive. You can get the 300GB version for $190.
 
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