copying an os onto a new harddrive

elitejp

New Member
I have an old computer that just had its hard drive fail. It uses ide and I bought a sata 1tb hard drive with a conveter to ide. It doesnt work. Some tech guys said that the computer is too old to support anything in that league but should be able to support 160g or maybe 320g. In another computer i have a 320g board but it has windows on it along with a few other things. Would i be able to switch everything on the 320g drive to the 1tb drive and then switch the drives in the computer? The 320g would then go into the old computer with the broken hd and the 1tb would be in the working computer.
 
you can't just copy an operating system to another hdd. they are hardware sepcific. you need to format the drive and do a fresh install of windows.
 
If it's in the same computer, you should be fine. Most drive manufactures have software avlaible to make direct drive to drive copies. There are other drive imaging programs out there, such as Ghost...though I forget if you can do drive to drive with that as I always make images of drives first :P

As for the computer and its age... Well first off I never heard too many good things about those SATA to IDE converters, so I'd suspect that's your first problem. I suspect the computer would be able to use the drive if you had a SATA controller (IE a PCI card with SATA ports on it)
 
you can't just copy an operating system to another hdd. they are hardware sepcific. you need to format the drive and do a fresh install of windows.

You might need to apply a fix, if you go from PATA to native SATA. Otherwise it works beautifully.
 
You might need to apply a fix, if you go from PATA to native SATA. Otherwise it works beautifully.

Don't think that'd be a problem with an IDE to SATA converter, but that is something I forgot about if using a SATA controller... Windows would freak out due to the lack of SATA drivers. That is unless you had the computer boot to an IDE emulation mode.
 
True, a primitive converter (between the harddrive and the ribbon cable) will not change how the OS talks with the controller, so that will work.

If you install a pci device with a sata controller on it then a driver will be needed.
 
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