Transferring to new drive

[frankenhud]

So I was recently forced to order a new motherboard for my old Dimension 8200 (luckily they're cheap these days). But it's clear that it's time to start moving toward a new PC, so I'm going to start by getting a SATA hard drive and $20 PCI SATA controller.

I currently use two 40GB IDE drives in the Dell. I'm wondering if this plan will work:

Install a 160GB SATA drive
Simply copy my two IDE drives to the new drive
Take out the old drives, and just use the new SATA drive

Will the SATA drive just boot right up, with XP copied from my old drive? Or are drives through a PCI adapter not bootable?

 

[Zepper]

It should as long as the SATA controller is set to non-RAID mode. Your currently installed Windwoes probably won't boot on a new mobo. And if you try and fail, it might not boot again if you hook it back to the old mobo. You'll generally have to reinstall Win for a new mobo. But occasionally it works.

.bh.

 

[Commontone]

Ha, just realized my work computer had my first login info (this is Frankenhud/Commontone). I'll log into my second account and stop this doppelganger business.

I'll see how the XP/new motherboard thing goes. At least, I'm happy to have switched to the Praetorian case. IMO it's the best-looking case I've seen -- only the Lian Li aluminums are comparable.

Another hard drive question; I've read that SATA II drives are backward compatible with SATA I. This is good, because the inexpensive PCI SATA controllers are all SATA I, but I want to get a SATA II drive (looking ahead to new PC in 6-12 months).

But does the decision to use the drive as SATA I or II factor into how it is formatted, or is it just a jumper switch, or automatic? I'm worried that if I'm using the new drive with the PCI adapter, then put it in a new computer, I'll have to reformat for SATA II.

Also, according to Wikipedia it looks like a standard PCI 2.2 slot has 133MB/s bandwidth. So using a SATA drive w/PCI adapter, it would only be as fast as ATA-133, correct? I'm fine with this, just want to know what to expect.

 

[Zepper]

No mechanical drive I know of is faster in the real world than the PCI bus, so don't worry about it. Most top SATA drives max out at a true 70 or so MB/sec. The latest Raptor may do a bit better. And it takes the latest generation of 15k SCSI drives to break 100MB/sec on a regular basis.

.bh.

 

[sutahz]

Yes you will be able to boot off the pci card.
If you just straight copy data your computer will not boot (no bootloader installed on the sata drive). Is your new drive OEM or retail? If its retail it should have a CD so you can image your boot IDE drive to the new SATA drive, after that imaging is done, disconnect both your ide drives, boot up the sata drive (to make sure it works). Shutdown, reconnect the non-OS ide drive. Boot up, xfer files, s/d, remove ide drives.

 

[frankenhud]

OK. One more question, I know SATA II is backward-compatible with SATA I. Does this include the cables as well? I'm gonna run this SATA II drive on a SATA I controller--can I use the SATA II cable for this?

 

[sutahz]

A cable is a cable.

 

[Commontone]

OK -- I just went through with this procedure. I used Acronis True Image to successfully clone my bootable IDE drive to the new SATA drive. And thankfully the SATA drive boots great, and is much faster.

However, I also have a second IDE hard drive that I used mostly for MP3/lossless. The PC will not boot up when this second hard drive is connected; it sees it is not bootable and gives up, without moving on to try the SATA drive. If I connect the drive after the computer boots up, Windows does not detect and install it. How am I to transfer the contents of this second drive to the new SATA, if I can't connect it?!??