2xIDE->1xSATA transfer

deshepherd · 1 Mar 2008 at 00:30

Just trying to shift from IDE to SATA on my PC in preparation to eventual mboard upgrade which wont have enough IDE/PATA channels.

Currently I have 2 80GB IDE disks (one with C: and D: and the other with E

and have bought a 250GB SATA.

What's the best way to get all the data across (keeping same 3 partitions once the IDE disks are removed). Thought Acronis/Seagate discwizard would be the answer but as far as I can see that will only clone 1 disk to another and can't cope with the dea of cloning 2 disks onto 1.

Any tips?

Snapshot · 1 Mar 2008 at 06:41

I'd clone the C: partition to make sure the new disk is bootable then use Windows Explorer to copy D: & E:.

deshepherd · 1 Mar 2008 at 08:27

I'd been thinking along those lines but had found windows explorer gave an error ... I think now that this may be down to Sony SonicStage creating dirs with stupildy long names (uses album name for dir name and in my case with classical music "album name" can be the name of an opera, its composer + list of solists, orchestra, conductor etc!). I'll transfer these across using SS backup program (about time I made a backup anyway :-)

and see if explorer will do the rest now

deshepherd · 1 Mar 2008 at 17:10

Did transfers in windows explorer but then found couldn't boot off SATA drive (sure I had done so earlier) but think that one of the partition management progs I'd found on PCW free CDs and had tried had probably mangled MBRs! So started with a new clone of C: and D: to the SATA drive then copied the E: across in windows explorer (minus the sonic stage database that I'm restoring seperately via its backup mechanism). SATA booted and I've now unplugged the old IDE disks and all seems ok!

Only niggle at the moment is that I;m using an Asrock Dual SATA mboard but wasn't able to get the SATA-2 port to work so drive is on a SATA-1 port ... however, I've a forthcoming mboard/CPU upgrade planned (which was why I was moving to SATA in any case) so I'll assume I'll get SATA2 when its running on a chipset that supports it "natively" rather than by the add on interface on the Asrock. Also, when I do this I'll have to get a SATA DVD drive as well as my IDE one has "expired" while I was doing this probably on its way out for sometime as when case was open I identified it as the source of the strange clicking sound I'd been hearing for soe time) and I'm currently back to a HP CDRW drive I bought around 8-9 years ago that I found I'd still got lying around!

Snapshot · 1 Mar 2008 at 19:12

Glad to hear you got it all working. To be honest, you probably won't see much difference between SATAI and II as the drives still aren't as fast as the interface.