Replacing Hard Drive

[davedamon2000]

Hi there. I'm thinking of replacing my current 80Gb IDE secondary drive, which is used primarily for large file storage with a 200Gb SATA drive. This wouldn't be a challange for me. But then something occured to me. If I'm getting a SATA drive, which is faster than IDE, shouldn't I be using it as my primary drive? So I was wondering, is it possible to hook the SATA drive up at the same time as my main 200Gb IDE drive, with the SATA as a slave drive, then copy the ENTIRE contence of the primary IDE drive over, OS and all. Once that is done, will the SATA then be capable of functioning as my main OS drive with the 200Gb Ide being formated and serving as the slave storage drive? I'm not sure because I've never tried to copy OS and I wasn't sure if the boot sector would copy over as well. Many thanks for any help in advance.

 

[Adidas4275]

satas dont have slave and master... they have their own controller and one port per drive... but

no just copying wont get the registry or master boot record...

norton ghost can image an entire drive and copy it to a new drive and it will work.... but you will have to deal with the isse, depending on your mobo with SATA v IDE drivers for windows... I know this is one way to do it, there may be others..

 

[Dennis Gordon]

Acronis Migrate Easy will clone your system disk in a few minutes, and they offer a free 15 day fully functional demo. I've used it on 2 different builds. Very simple and fast.

 

[djnes]

If your motherboard has native support for SATA, you should be able to ghost it. I would make sure you have the SATA drivers installed first though...just in case. At worst, you my have to run a repair install.

However, you should compare the two 200 GB drives. If they are identical, except one is SATA and one is IDE, you aren't going to see a performance difference.