Need support for SATA Drives installation

[Zenoth]

Alright, here's the situation.

Currently, I have two IDE Drives (Ultra ATA right ? I can't remember the exact interface name for those old Drives). One of them has Windows installed on it plus some games (that's the C:\ Drive, that one is set to Master), and the second Drive, which is set to Slave (that's the D:\ Drive), holds most of my back-ups (music, videos, game patches, demos, and so on). But today I bought two SATA Drives that I intend to install in regular SATA mode for now (perhaps RAID later). Now, of course, I want to replace both old Drives currently installed by the new ones ... but there is a little something I was wondering about ...

How should I proceed if I want to transfer the data from my Slave IDE Drive to one of the SATA Drives WITHOUT removing the Master IDE Drive which has Windows on it ? Is it possible ?

I was thinking of doing perhaps the following if I really have to remove the Master IDE Drive, let me know if it would be alright:

1) Remove Master IDE Drive
2) Keep Slave IDE Drive
3) Install SATA Drive #1 to replace Master IDE Drive
4) Install new Windows installation on new SATA Drive #1
5) Once in Windows, browse the Slave IDE Drive, copy/paste all data from it to the new SATA Drive #1
6) Remove Slave IDE Drive (now empty)
7) Install SATA Drive #2 to replace Slave IDE Drive
8) Done ?

However, if there is a way to do that without removing the Master IDE Drive please let me know.

Thanks.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: Zenoth

8) Done ?

However, if there is a way to do that without removing the Master IDE Drive please let me know.

Thanks.

No, reinstall all the software and games.

And you can't go back and install RAID later. You have to set up the raid when you install the OS.

There are a lot of ways to accomplish what you want to do. The easiest would to just hook up the two SATA drives, set up the raid in the BIOS, set the SATA raid as the boot device and install windows onto it. When you boot you'll get a boot option menu to choose either the old windows or the new installation. Boot into the new, copy/delete/install what you want. You can then reformat both IDE drives and use them for whatever. Then just edit the old windows install out of the boot.ini file.

You could use an imaging program (Acronis?) to image the old boot drive onto a new drive, or onto a raid, but you have the perfect excuse now to do a clean, fresh install of windows.