Mixing Hard Drive Interfaces

[Carbo]

In the process of upgrading, I am swapping out two IDE drives for two SATA drives. I'll install the new 80GB SATA to be used as my boot drive. Then I want to reinstall my old IDE drive and transfer data to the new disc. Can this be done?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Yes, SATA and IDE can co-exist. But how simple it will be depends on whether you want to clone the entire old OS install from the old drive to the SATA or just copy your data and do a clean install.

I would recommend a clean install of Windows and then copy over your data.

You CAN clone the drive (with Norton Ghost or some other utility) but then you'll have to perform a boot repair at a minimum (to allow Windows to boot from a different hardware address than it used to) or a repair install of WinXP at worst (more likely).

Either way make sure to configure the BIOS to specify the SATA drive to be a boot device BEFORE the IDE drive or it'll try to boot from the IDE drive. Your boot order in BIOS should be floppy->cdrom->SATA. You shouldn't even list an IDE drive as bootable.

 

[Carbo]

My plans were to do a clean install of XP Pro on the new SATA drive. Then, transfer miscellaneous data and files to a separate partition on that new drive. Sounds like it'll be a snap. And thanks for the tips on proper BIOS settings.