Help with SATA Hard Drive Install!

[Teh_Tech]

Hi! I am not sure if this is posed in the correct forum, if not please feel free to move it to the relevant section!

Right, I have bought a new SATA hard drive off fleebay and am due to receive it tomorrow, now this is my first ever SATA drive I have experienced and need help and advice for setting it up!

Its a 40GB drive, and would like this as my main System OS boot drive to replace my current IDE PATA drive.

I do not have any other SATA drives, so a RAID/mirror/stripe is not necessary and I would get confused with such!

My questions:

** Can I clone my current WinXP partition and simply restore it on the new drive or would I need to do a complete new install?

** I have the SATA Driver Floppy thingy from the mobo manufacturer, can I just add this to the drivers in nLite (I am doing an nLite modded install and I seem to remember a long time ago I had a customers laptop with a SATA hard drive, i just added the SATA drivers to nLite & it worked!) would this work on my desktop machine?

** My mobo is a SATA I revision, (1.5Gb/s) is there any increase of speed compared to my current PATA drive, and would I notice such a speed change?

Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back from people soon with the replies!

Arty.

[jaclaz]

Hi! I am not sure if this is posed in the correct forum, if not please feel free to move it to the relevant section!

Rest assured, it is NOT!

Ideally it should go here:

MSFN Forums> Microsoft Software Products - Discussion & Support> Windows XP

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=34

(Since it is a software problem of XP, and not actually a hardware problem)

But I guess it's fine , a Mod might want to move it where more appropriate.

My questions:

** Can I clone my current WinXP partition and simply restore it on the new drive or would I need to do a complete new install?

YES/NO.

Meaning yes you can, BUT you will need to have set the hard disk bus in IDE compatibility mode in BIOS.

Also there are "cloning" and "cloning" methods, meaning that diferent "cloning" programs/methods may lead to different results.

Then, you can install the SATA driver and switch the BIOS:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=120444&st=589

Or you can try an offline install of the SATA drivers, some info here:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11729&st=0

And here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showforum=43

** I have the SATA Driver Floppy thingy from the mobo manufacturer, can I just add this to the drivers in nLite (I am doing an nLite modded install and I seem to remember a long time ago I had a customers laptop with a SATA hard drive, i just added the SATA drivers to nLite & it worked!) would this work on my desktop machine?

Sure it will, but that would be a re-install (from scratch).

** My mobo is a SATA I revision, (1.5Gb/s) is there any increase of speed compared to my current PATA drive, and would I notice such a speed change?

NO, nothing relevant.

SATA 1 has a VERY similar speed as to ATAPI/IDE "133", and unless your current drive is an older type, like "100" you won't see a great deal of difference (please read as probably none), it also depnds of the actual hd drive features and of the ability of the motherboard hardware/driver to use them, see previous reference:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=120444&st=589

Post details on your intended "cloning" procedure, and we will be able to further assist you...

jaclaz

Edited August 26, 2010 by jaclaz