how does one "switch" HDs to make external enclosure

[ncheran]

I wanted to upgrade my HD. I was wondering if I could take my older Hitachi SATA 160Gb HD, switch it w/ a new Seagate 320gb (SATA or ATA), and make my Hitachi a backup drive using an external enclosure setup. How would I go about doing that? How would I get Windows XP pro and all the other programs from the Hitachi to the Seagate? Is it a direct copy, or do I have to redo everything from scratch? Also, I would have to get a SATA enclosure, right? How do they work? Just a USB 2 connection like the ATA drive enclosures?

If this is too much of a hassle, the other option I was considering was to make the Seagate my backup drive and put it in the enclosure. Any help/thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks.


AOpen AK86-L
AMD Athlon 64 3000
Radeon 9800 pro
Creative X-Fi Audio
1gb Corsair ram
Windows XP Pro

 

[MarkeDC]

Could go total custom and make ur own external enclosure, wire sata connection/power out of ur case to it. I think im gonna do that since I am running out of room in my media center case for hard drives. Just dont unplug it while its running . As far as the copying thing goes, I would just reinstall windows, but im sure you could get some data backup software or migrating thing that would do what you want.

 

[Okasa]

well you can always go buy an external enclosure bay for the drive, stick it in it and *poof* its an external drive. thats prob the cleanest way to do it and u dont use up a sata slot (or ide if its pata).

i agree that the best idea would be to do a fresh install. however, if you really want to copy all ur system files over and do a 1:1 to ur new harddrive, then use Partition Magic(reccomended) or Norton Ghost to copy everything over. should be simple with that.

 

[Trey22]

Your 160GB has a SATA interface? Even if it's IDE, all you need is an external enclosure... I use and have had great success with BYTECC enclosures.

My imaging software of choice is Acronis TrueImage, worth every penny. Plug in your new drive, choose Disk Clone, and you're done, your new Seagate drive now looks/feels exactly like your original drive. TrueImage also lets you create an image from within Windows.

 

[ncheran]

Thanks for recommendations. It's the Windows thing that's worrying me: If I do a fresh install of XPpro (and all other programs), will I have problems from Microsoft legal division? How does that work? Please excuse the ignorance.

Also, my Hitachi that I want to make into a external drive via an enclosure is SATA, so I need a SATA enclosure right? Does that mean I have to connect it to something other that the USB 2 port? I'm unclear how these work.

Again, thank you.

 

[Trey22]

If you reinstall XP, you can probably just re-activate it online... if it happens to come back and say your key is already in use, you just call up MS, talk to a rep, and they'll give you the long string to input to active Windows.

Yeah, you'll need a SATA external enclosure. The interface to your PC can vary, the most popular being USB 2.0, but some enclosures use Firewire and Ethernet (RJ45).

 

[ncheran]

One last thing: If I upgrade to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive as my primary (and use the Hitachi SATA as my external backup), will I have to make changes to my MB or will it "accept" 3.oGb/s? I see that there is not a huge selection of SATA150s left, certainly no 7200.10s. I haven't done much research as these questions are just now popping up.