copy and entire OS to another drive

[Borealis7]

im going to ditch my IDE drive for a SATA2 HDD (WD 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache)
my current drive is divided to 3 partitions, and most likely i will partition the new one to 3 as well.
can i copy my C drive which has the OS on it (XP Pro) as is through windows, then diconnect the IDE drive and everything will work?

or do i need some application to do this? preferably something free

thanks.

 

[Keitero]

Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image will clone HDs from drive to drive or partition to partition. They are not free however but are worth the money if you plan on doing backups via image files in the future or moving from HD to HD.

 

[azilaga]

If you're looking for a free app, Macrium Reflect works fine as well.

 

[DSF]

You should be able to download a fully functional trial of Acronis. If not, hard drive manufacturers generally have their own utilities for this purpose. I know Seagate has one powered by Acronis that's free to use as long as one of the drives is a Seagate.

 

[theAnimal]

I just used Clonezilla to switch from IDE to SATA last week. It's free and works very well. (The WD program would not work for me.)

 

[Borealis7]

Thanks for all the advice.

but thoeretically speaking, wouldnt a byte-by-byte copy of an entire drive be enough for an OS to run? i mean if all the registry and drivers are there, why would the OS care what drive it runs on as long as all the paths are the same?

 

[hanspeter]

Windows has it stored somewhere in the registry what kind of interface it boots from. So going from ata to (native) sata needs a little tweak to work

 

[bob4432]

here is what i do and it has worked 100% for years.

buy acrons for the $15 you can usually find it for. i think it is currently version 11 for $15 or so. install it and make the boot disk. boot from the cd and the copy the one drive to the other. when done, remove the old drive and you should be g2g.

i use to use ghost exclusively, but since i had a few failures in backups i quit using it years ago, and have been acronis since - and no problem.

hanspeter - i don't there is an issue as i have gone from ide to scsi w/ no issues whatsoever and also sata and pata boot drives. again, never an issue. you just tell the bios where to boot from.

 

[RebateMonger]

There are two separate actions here:
1) Clone the drive
2) Make Windows boot to the new SATA drive controller

There a lot of software for making a drive clone. Most should be able to handle to two different drive controllers (IDE versus SATA).

The bigger problem is going to be how to get Windows to boot from the new drive/controller. Once Windows is set up, it wants to boot from the same drive controller at each boot. Just feeding it a new driver won't force it to change boot controllers.

The EASY way is to permanently change your new SATA controller to IDE Compatibility Mode. Then, you just change your old Windows install to use a generic IDE controller and remove the old controller from Windows. On booting to the new hardware, Windows will see a generic IDE controller and will boot.

A bit more work is to hook up the cloned SATA drive and perform a Windows Repair Install. It takes as long as installing Windows from scratch, and you have to re-do any Service Packs or Updates that were offered after your Windows Install CD was created (or slipstreamed with new Updates). But this method is pretty likely to succeed and offers the chance to use SATA AHCI drivers if you wish. You shouldn't lose your installed applications, configuration, or data. Unless something goes awry, that is.

There's software that will do a bare-metal clone to completely different hardware, but those aren't free. StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop Edition (about $70) will do this. I haven't tested it but their similar ShadowProtect Server Edition seems to do it pretty well.

If anybody has other ways to do this, I'd like to hear about them. I haven't had to do an IDE to SATA migration yet, but I'm sure I'll have to sometime soon.

One thing I'd recommend is to clone the as-is drive to another IDE drive or make an image backup of it, just in case something goes wrong.