Astound Me With Your Expertise

[Endohopper]

I know that many among you are well versed in the arcane art of PC wizardry , so here's hoping someone may be able to help . I'm running a regular IDE disk and just purchased a second disk , this one is SATA .

All I want to achieve is both being visible at the same time , so I can transfer my data to the SATA disk . Both / either disks are running fine , and are formatted and have XP installations . I had hoped that both would be visible and I could copy my data from IDE to the SATA disk , but there are too many variables for my inexperienced mind to calculate . These include :

• Jumper settings
• BIOS settings
• Cable arrangements .

The annoyance is that once achieved , all I wanna do is transfer my data and then run just the SATA . Any tips / ideas ?

[paolo]

Allright, well I'm guessing your problem is that both HDDs are set up as primary masters. So, set either one's jumper as primary slave. Then reboot, go in the bios setting (F1 I think at boot screen, I think) then make sure the HDD that's set up as primary master is the primary master and the primary slave is the primary slave. Reboot and you should see both HDDs

As for the cables, there's not much to be worried about, as long as they're plugged in somewhere that makes sense IE, sata drive to sata input in mother board, IDE drive to IDE slot in motherboard (might be on the same cable as the CD drive).

I'm by no means an expert on the subject and I'm only speaking by my personal experience, you might want to validate my thoughts with someone elses post, not that there should be any harm in trying. Just don't remove either cable (power and data) from the disk when the computer is running, apparently it can harm it...

[Tomm]

What I would do is to put the new Sata one in and remove the old one, then install Windows on the new drive. Then when it's installed, just plug the old one back in. I'm not sure how your bios will handle it - whether it will take the SATA one as the primary (and boot off that) or whether it will revert to the installation on the IDE drive.

However, it shouldn't really matter. Just boot up into whichever Windows you get and copy the files over to the new drive. Then you can format the old one. That's what SHOULD happen with any decent modern motherboard.

However. You may run into issues with both hard drives containing an MBR. And I'm not sure I'd know about fixing that. Hmmm.

Another way to do it would be to wipe the SATA drive, and then create two partitions. Stick all your files and stuff on one partition leaving the other one clear. Then remove the IDE drive and re-install Windows on the Sata drive on the free partition.