New Hard Drive to replace old one

vinylmusic

I have a 20Gb IDE hard drive in my computer and I'm replacing it with an 80gb SATA drive
I have an external 300gb drive too which I use for backup storage
I have the code for my Win XP but cant find the disc
Does anyone know if theres a way to copy everything over from the 20gb disc to the new SATA 80gb one to make an exact copy of windows and everything else without having to reinstall Windows xp etc by starting from scratvh.
I assume I can install the new one leaving the old one in.
I imagine there must be a program that can transfer everything
Then I'd like to set up the new disc as master and the old one as slave
Any advice would be appreciated

toastydave

norton ghost from symantec http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost10

Free trial

http://www.symantecstore.com/dr/sat4/ec_MAIN.Entry17C?SID=49997&SP=10024&CID=0&PID=&PN=29&S1=&S2=&S3=&S4=&S5=&V1=31040596&V2=31040596&V3=1&V4=10&V5=&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=0

This will take an exact image of your 20Gb drive and put it on your new drive, so theres no need for a re-load or keys

espresso

Download a small utility like xclone. Not used it with XP so unsure about the fact that it would look like a different machine.

Little_John

Just a quick one
Yeah you can use norton ghost or drive copy there are loads of them about ghot is the easiest to use to copy your drive to your new one but I am slightly put off by you wantng to fit a sata drive in to a pc that currently has IDE then you want the sata drive to be master.

Does your pc have a sata controler? by that I mean can you actually plug a sata drive in to the pc? if not how are you going to put a sata drive in there. yes sata is faster that IDE and that is why people use them. a pc with a 20GB drive is proberbyl older than you thing and was possibly built before sata was available, I always use a sata drive is the port is available.

sata drives also have 1 drive to a cable so there is no master and slave when it cmes to sata your boot drive is set by the port you put it in sata1 will be the boot drive your mother board manual will tell you this and it will be writen on the board next to each port the number. you then need ot set the bios which drive to boot to usualy in the advanced features setion or the boot section set it to sata1 higher up the list than IDE.

Dont go buying the drive untill your sure you have sata available in your pc, uo can buy controler cards for sata to be able to boot it will require a bios on the card some and cant be booted to.

vinylmusic

Thank you for your information
The computer is not so old. Actually I built it myself. I knew my last computer was on the way out so I had already started building it.
I only had to buy a new case, motherboard, cpu, fan and graphics card. Everything else came out of my old one
My 20gb was ide of course even though I could see it would take a SATA. I just needed to wait till I had some more money.
Now I have the 80gb SATA I would like to make the switch over as simple as possible.
I guess Norton Ghost is the best solution. Happily I have a full version of Norton system works. I hadn't realized its capabilities.
Thank you everyone for your help on this

Little_John wrote:

Just a quick one
Yeah you can use norton ghost or drive copy there are loads of them about ghot is the easiest to use to copy your drive to your new one but I am slightly put off by you wantng to fit a sata drive in to a pc that currently has IDE then you want the sata drive to be master.

Does your pc have a sata controler? by that I mean can you actually plug a sata drive in to the pc? if not how are you going to put a sata drive in there. yes sata is faster that IDE and that is why people use them. a pc with a 20GB drive is proberbyl older than you thing and was possibly built before sata was available, I always use a sata drive is the port is available.

sata drives also have 1 drive to a cable so there is no master and slave when it cmes to sata your boot drive is set by the port you put it in sata1 will be the boot drive your mother board manual will tell you this and it will be writen on the board next to each port the number. you then need ot set the bios which drive to boot to usualy in the advanced features setion or the boot section set it to sata1 higher up the list than IDE.

Dont go buying the drive untill your sure you have sata available in your pc, uo can buy controler cards for sata to be able to boot it will require a bios on the card some and cant be booted to.