Ghosting an IDE boot disk to a SATA boot disk

[Correction]

I'm trying to upgrade my C: drive without reinstalling windows and every other application that's ever written to my registry. I'm told ghost is good for this, but even after googling I have some issues.

Will Windows XP sit in a corner and pout at me because the boot drive is on a completely different disk controller? If so, how do I avoid it?

If I understand the logistics, it's install new drive -> ghost to new drive -> power down and remove old drive -> reboot and make sure the BIOS gets the boot disk right? Something I missed?

Tips appreciated, I've never tried this before since I don't do this for a living.

[Cephius]

Uh yeah I think you're making it out to be a bit more complicated than it has to be. Put in your new drive, clone the old drive to the new one, then power down and pull the old drive. You shouldn't need to adjust the BIOS at all, it should detect and use the new hard drive without a problem. If you plan to leave both drives in the machine, or if you have other hard drives in it, then you just simply need to adjust the hard drive boot order in the BIOS.

As for tips, I'd back up everything before cloning. Typically if something goes wrong during the clone, you'll lose everything on both drives. It's rare, but I've seen it happen more than a few times.

The other thing to watch for is if the destination drive is larger than the source drive, you need to make sure the cloning program you use will extend the partition to encompass the additional space. Otherwise, you'll end up with a new drive that's the same size as your old one plus a bunch of unpartitioned space. Most cloning programs don't do this by default which is why I'm mentioning it. There should be an option to do it, so just look for that.

[Isiolia]

The other thing you may need to watch out for is what mode the SATA interface is in. The "better" mode for SATA is AHCI or SATA native mode, which allows for things like hot-swapping SATA drives.
Prior to Windows Vista, there was no native support for that, and even with Vista/7, Windows often doesn't like it if you swap between them.

Basically, probably will need to ensure that your bios has IDE mode set for SATA.

[Isiolia]

duplicate

[Akucaen]

If you're using a version older than Vista, windows will probably freak the fuck out if you try and boot it. Switch your SATA controller to IDE mode or have a driver disk handy and leave it in AHCI.

[Rellikard]

My hard drive in my old computer died a year ago. The old HDD was IDE and the new one I bought was SATA. Before it died I imaged it with Macrium Reflect Free edition and imaged it over to the new bigger SATA HDD. Worked fine without problems. So everything you're doing should work fine.

PS: I was on XP.

[Akucaen]

Since you say "old" computer, my 2008 era P35 board still had IDE-compatibility mode set as the default SATA behavior... just saying.

[Correction]

Since you say "old" computer, my 2008 era P35 board still had IDE-compatibility mode set as the default SATA behavior... just saying.

My Motherboard: http://www.giga-byte.com/Support/Mot...ProductID=2810

Looks like AHCI is disabled and the SATA controller is in Legacy IDE mode by default. So I reckon I'm in the clear...?

[Rellikard]

Since you say "old" computer, my 2008 era P35 board still had IDE-compatibility mode set as the default SATA behavior... just saying.

Guess it depends on your board. I had a cheap MSI board from 2006. And old computer because I'm using i7 now.

[Akucaen]

My Motherboard: http://www.giga-byte.com/Support/Mot...ProductID=2810

Looks like AHCI is disabled and the SATA controller is in Legacy IDE mode by default. So I reckon I'm in the clear...?

Yeah. You'll have no problem switching the drives out as far as windows is concerned.