Installing a new HDD

[Rich]

I know I'll fuck this up somehow, so i'm looking for some instructions before I try my hand at it.

I had two HDDs in my pc, one IDE and on SATA. I use one as my main drive and one as a media drive. I thought it was the other way around, but the drive with Windows on it is my IDE drive and not my SATA.

I've wanted to move to two SATAs for a while now and recently I've been hearing grinding coming from what I think is my IDE drive. I thought it was my media drive and so would be an easy fix. It's my Windows drive.

So the new SATA came today and I had only one SATA power cable but fortunately I had a IDE-Sata adaptor in my box of random PC cables. So I hook it up (it's oddly smaller than the other two drives although it's 3.5") and obviously it's recognized in the BIOS but not Windows (hasn't been formatted yet.)



So I need instructions on how to go about formatting the new drive, moving Windows from the IDE over to the new SATA (a new install, I would imagine?) and how to go about having the two SATA drives run most efficiently.


I <3 you TNL

[cka]

new install?

just ghost the image from the pata drive to the sata drive

[Rich]

Do explain.

This would just copy it over to the new HDD and then I can take out the old?

[cka]

a bit-for-bit copy, yes

[Rich]

Do I need to format the new drive first? And which software do you recommend for the ghost?

[cka]

I don't know probably, and any of the open source ones should do just fine (I think the ultimate boot cd has a few that are tested & true you can use)

[Rich]

I did a bit by bit clone on the drive and shit just got fucked up.

When only the two SATAs are in, it hands on the Windows splash.

When all three are in, I can't boot from the original IDE. I can boot from the new SATA but lots of shit is fucked up.

Bah. I'm thinking if just wiping and reinstalling Windows.



"Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\HarddiskVolume1\blahblahblah. The data has been lost."

Multiple times.