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Vista Business install/move from ide to sata drive

S

sbergen10

Junior Member
My wife's computer is running low on drive space. The machine runs Vista Business and has a 250 GB Seagate 7200.10 ide drive in it. The motherboard has both ide and sata controllers and is based on the Nforce Ultra 4 chipset. I'm planning to use Symantec Ghost to image the old ide drive to a new 500 gb sata drive and ditch the ide drive afterwards - are there any guidelines on what might happen when trying to boot from the sata drive? I'm assuming I would need to hack the boot.ini file afterwards from a winpe boot disc or perhaps run a repair install from a Vista cd. Thanks for your suggestions!
 
It's very UNLIKELY that the clone SATA drive will boot. If it was XP, you could run a "Repair Install" after cloning it to the SATA drive. Frankly, although I've played with the Vista Repair function, I don't know how well it handles this job.

If you are willing (and able) to run your SATA drive in "IDE Compatibility mode" in the BIOS, then there's a trick where you change the intiial system to a "Generic IDE" driver, shut it down, and then clone it. When it reboots on a SATA drive, it'll look for a generic IDE drive controller and should find it and boot.

But if you are running the new drive in AHCI or RAID mode, you'll need to do something else. Hopefully the Vista repair functions will do it. I just don't know.

There are other options. Microsoft's Sysprep utility, for instance. Or a backup/restore program that can handle "different-hardware restores".
 
I did it a lot of times. I.e cloning an IDE Drive to a larger SATA Drive to use on the same computer.

I am using Acronis True Image 11.

As long (as RebateMonger mentioned) Not a RAID, or some other ecsotic configuration it would work.

If it does not boot correctly use the original Vista DVD to do a repair.
 
Thanks so much for the suggestions, I really appreciate it! I think before buying a new drive I will borrow one from work and try imaging to that drive to see what happens. Unfortunately my wife is against a Vista reinstall on a new hd so that's not an option!
 
You can leave the current Drive as is and add a new SATA to be used for storage as Drive D:
 
I know Acronis TI will do what you're asking for just fine. Ghost should be the same, if the backup method works the same way.
 
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