HD question

JLuchinski

JLuchinski

Well-Known Member
I just upgraded my motherboard and it has SATA connections. I'm using and IDE hard drive right now, but I'd like to go and get a SATA drive. Now my question is, can I hook up the SATA drive as a slave and just copy my IDE drive to it? Or will I have to do a fresh windows install on the SATA drive and then connect my IDE drive via usb connector after and copy my data that way? TIA.
 
Slave isn't the right word but, yes, you can have SATA and IDE drives on the same computer as long as you have controllers for each on the mainboard. To do what you want to do requires a sector copy program which copies the data bit for bit rather than file for file from one drive to the other. Otherwise, you would have to gen the operating system from scratch on the new drive.
 
So I connect the SATA drive, set the jumper to slave, and windows will recognize it? Then I download a sector copy program and go from there? Also if I decide to keep the IDE drive as a slave along side the SATA, will I still get bottle necks?
 
There's no slave jumper on an SATA drive. All you have to do is connect it and set the IDE drive to be the boot drive in the BIOS (or not since you are just doing a copy you could use a bootable CD with the utility on it or something)
 
No, you do not need to set any Master or Slave jumpers on SATA drives. The physical drive, once connected to the SATA bus, should be recognized by the OS. You may have to format it to mount however. You can use your IDE drive as a secondary drive on the IDE bus with no issues.

As for drive backup and restore, I would recommend Macrium Reflect (free). Using this program you can creat a backup image of your drive for saftey and also then "restore" that image to your new SATA drive - all while running off the IDE drive. Or, there are plenty of other direct bit/sector copy programs to do this without the extra step of the backup.
 
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