Moving C: drive from PATA to SATA

[xane]

As part of my upgrade plan for my aged PC I want to first move totally onto SATA RAID 1, there are a couple of 1TB drives already in the post, but is it fairly easy to move the C: (system) drive by simply Norton Ghost-ing it over ?

I'm still on Windows XP, I've upgraded the PATA IDE drive several times in the past, using a secondary drive or CD/DVD to store/restore from, but my concern is if I transfer straight from the PATA to SATA will it boot up ? My concern is with the SATA drivers needed by Windows XP.

Any things to watch out for, from experienced Freddies who have already done this ?

Also, should I set the drive as RAID 1 before or after the transfer ?

Aged system is AMD XP 3200+, Asus A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2), 2GB RAM, Windows XP SP3.

 

[soze]

You should be fine but your right the sata drives may cause you a problem. If they do look in the BIOS for AHCI or hard disk controller options and pick a compatibility mode. This should remove the need for sata drivers.

 

[Bob007]

Put the sata drives in the system. Boot up from the pata drives. Windows will find the sata drives and install any drivers and software needed to run them. Then when you clone over the drives windows will boot up just fine. Otherwise is runs the risk of crapping out on boot up has it can't run the drive its installed on, happened to me a few times and then i shake my head in disgust at the fact i forgot to do this and have to start again

I'd go with setting up the raid 1. Boot into windows from the pata. Make sure the windows install finds the extra sata drive and it show in disc management (right click my computer and click Manage) Then use ghost or what ever you prefer to clone over the pata on to the sata. Remove the pata and boot the system. If it works, log into you user and confirm everything functions as it should (had some freaking stuff crap out in the past) then reboot and log in again. User system and hold on to pata for a week or so before you decide its no longer worth keeping.

I do have a preference for HD clone when doing this, I have very little experiance with ghost so i may be talking bollocks from a ghost point of view

 

[Ch3tan]

Google g4u, it's a ghost program that boots from CD, linux based. Very simple, very effective.

 

[soze]

I still use Hirens for imaging ect

 

[xane]

Thanks for replies Freddies, I already have Norton Ghost so it should serve me well.

I've lost the LP4 - SATA power adapters, so project is on hold for the moment

I can't see the drives in BIOS for me to boot from, they may appear when powered. just can't figure out at the moment how the motherboard will know to boot from the SATA RAID 1 drives and not the IDE primary partition.

 

[soze]

You change the boot order. You just put your new drive higher in the boot order than your old one.

 

[Bob007]

Thanks for replies Freddies, I already have Norton Ghost so it should serve me well.

I've lost the LP4 - SATA power adapters, so project is on hold for the moment

I can't see the drives in BIOS for me to boot from, they may appear when powered. just can't figure out at the moment how the motherboard will know to boot from the SATA RAID 1 drives and not the IDE primary partition.

On my mobo. I enable the raid chip in the bios and set the channels i want to be part of the raid. In my case sata channel 1 and 3. Then i exit the bios and enter the raid setup. From here i set my raid up adding both drives to a raid 0(in your case would be a raid 1). Exit the raid setup, machine reboots, then back into the bios and check the harddisc settings for the boot order and select my sata drive.

 

[xane]

Poo.

The SATA chipset wont recognise the drives, the boot sequence just hangs. I'm assuming its too old and only takes SATA v1 (150MB/s), I can't reconfigure the drives.

I've updated the BIOS, I even had to buy a Floppy Disc to do that, no effect.

The vendor provided SATA BIOS updater wont detect the adapter unless a drive is plugged into it, and I can't boot if I do that.

Looks like Plan B, which is to upgrade the rest of the system from scratch.

 

[xane]

A bit of perseverance and I now have a SATA RAID 1 operational, I managed to find a patched version of the motherboard BIOS with the latest version of the SATA controller BIOS, from about 2007.

I decided to skip my geekiness and try and patch the BIOS myself with an even more up-to-date SATA BIOS, as the downloaded one works just fine.

However, as my path is strewn with cowpats from the Devil's own satanic herd, the version Norton Ghost I have is also too old to work with SATA RAID 1.

So suggestion for an alternative; I've got HD Clone, G4U and the stuff from Hirens, I don't mind forking out cash for something that works and is reliable.

It makes me want to go back to my expensive regular PC upgrading habit, at least I don't get these kind of problems.