Copying Hard Drive

adonis

I have just about filled my 40gb hard drive in my desktop pc and want to upgrade to a 160gb drive but i dont have a spare ide connector to connect the new disc to and transfer data across, i have seen usb to ide cables advertised will one of these do the job?

phill79

What do you have in your machine to not have a spare IDE connector?
Normally you can have 4 things comming off your IDE's, 2 CDROMS and 2 HD's.

BenL

You can run 2 drives off one cable in most instancies.

Does your ribbon cable have a secondary connector half way down??

You should also have some spare power cables from the PSU.

Set one drive to Master and the other to slave (via the jumper settings on the back).

You may need to enter the PC's BIOS on booting up (usually F1 or something - a prompt will appear) and tell the pc you have another drive. Some will autodetect.

Hope this helps.

It maybe possible that if you have a Dell or something they have cut costs and put single IDE connectors on and lack of power cables though to stop people upgrading.

Another option is to swap the cd or dvd drive connector temporarily to swap the data over.

Ben

adonis

Thanks for your replys, the other connector on the ide cable is connected to a dvd writer i didnt know if i could pull it off and plug it in to the new hard drive while i clone the old drive. I also have a spare power connector.
I am not bothered about running duel drives as the 40gb one runs at 5400 i believe and the new one will be 7200.

monterey_2

Just as an aside, when you've got your IDE configuratuion sorted, I can personally recommend Norton Ghost for helping with the moving of data to the new harddrive. it's the only Norton product I "get along" with, but I do find it very good.

M-

Alechjo

Of course it is ok to unplug a DVD-RW if you are not using it! Different speed drives on one cable may be not great for super perfomance (or any two drives on one cable, if talking Perfomance!), but one-off copying should be fine.