New SATA drive

robmar0se

I have used Ghost too, but it does give up if it hits a problem on the original drive. It would be a good idea anyway to do a check disk asap, as it may correct any errors (if too many it will tell you). Just go into the command prompt and type with out quotes "chkdsk c:/r" At the end if watching it will give you a report, if its says bad sectors then if definately needs replacing - if you miss it, let us know and we can tell you where to find the log.

Robm1955

Just to make things clear, before I buy, I don't need an extra/new cable if I buy a SATIII?

Robm1955

Ok, bought the hard drive you adviced, and found out how to remove the old one. Problem is, there is only room for 1 drive in the case.. What I need to know now is, if I get a external case for the new drive, will I be able to use Ghost to duplicate the old drive, and then swap them round? The cases I've been looking at are SATA Ide to USB. Is this what I want, as I've noticed there is a SATA socket on the back of my pc.

Sasahara2

Just take out your DVD drive and use the SATA connection that that used for the old drive so you can transfer the data over. I'm assuming this isn't for a pernament usage and just for transfer as the drive is dying.

Robm1955

Sasahara2 wrote: »

Just take out your DVD drive and use the SATA connection that that used for the old drive so you can transfer the data over. I'm assuming this isn't for a pernament usage and just for transfer as the drive is dying.

Yes, it's just to transfer the data. Thanks for that.

gavpowell

There is no such thing as an SATA 1,2 or 3 cable - an SATA cable is an SATA cable, anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken or works in marketing for a cable manufacturer. To the best of my knowledge, the drives are almost always backward-compatible too(I have heard of some instances of peculiar motherboards that wouldn't recognise the newer drives).

tombruton87

most sata drives should be backwards comapatible, there is a good chance however that ur mobo wont support a sata connected drive of over 1.5 tb

thor

gavpowell wrote: »

There is no such thing as an SATA 1,2 or 3 cable - an SATA cable is an SATA cable, anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken or works in marketing for a cable manufacturer. To the best of my knowledge, the drives are almost always backward-compatible too(I have heard of some instances of peculiar motherboards that wouldn't recognise the newer drives).

So will the same sata cable support SATAI speeds on a SATAI motherboard and SATAI HDD as well as SATAIII speeds on a SATAIII motherboard and SATAIII HDD?

gavpowell

thor wrote: »

So will the same sata cable support SATAI speeds on a SATAI motherboard and SATAI HDD as well as SATAIII speeds on a SATAIII motherboard and SATAIII HDD?

Yup - the newer cables have clips to fasten them onto the drive, but there is no performance increase whatsoever - they are the same cables.

Robm1955

I've been on holiday, so not had chance to get on with this. Now I'm back, I've decided to do a clean install. My current drive, has two partitions C: and (where I keep data). I am assuming, when I use my recovery disc on the new drive, it will just create the one partition with Vista on it. Is it easy to create a partition after I've installed Vista?