This is a Intel chipset MoBo with a Built in SATA Controller ICH5.
Present system has 2 small IDE hard drives with XP Home on one, would like to move it all to a 250G
SATA drive
Searches on Google seem to say its a problem in doing this, ie No SATA Driver and XP is setup to
boot from the IDE Driver not the SATA one.
We do not wish to format the SATA driver as it will take for to many days to recover the installed
programs.
Some of the google searched mentioned Acronis and Seagate DiskWizard, any help on this or some
sites to look at would be great.
Note not my PC and have done this many times before using Ghost but only with IDE drives.
Thank
I've solved this problem in Windows 2000. The problem of how to move a
complete Windows install onto another disk controller (from IDE to
SCSI or RAID if you want). Chances are it will work for you in XP as
well, provided that the XP licensing/activation subsystem won't mind
that you've moved the install to a different hard drive + controller
(should be okay).
As I can't get a static-enough absolute URL out of Google Groups (by
thread ID or something), please try searching "google groups" for this
query:
"moving live Windows2000 to another disk" (including the quotation
marks). The first posting in this thread is my summary.
To make a long story short, you need to have the source drive and
destination drive in the system together across several reboots,
switching the Windows-internal links from the first drive to the
second drive one by one, until finally the destination drive is able
to boot on its own.
For optimum performance, you'll need to configure your ICH5 to see
both IDE and SATA channels in their respective native form - in many
BIOSes, this is called the "Enhanced mode", and the native mode for
the SATA channels should be set to "native SATA" (not legacy IDE). The
BIOS menu entries are often poorly labeled/explained in the online
help... Consequently, you'll need to get drivers for ICH5 SATA
installed in your XP install on the source drive in order to even get
started (to see the destination drive). Obviously the destination
drive will initially get a different drive letter - that's okay, the
moving method handles that later on.
As for cloning, I'd recommend the latest DOS-based Ghost.EXE, I
believe the last version was v8.3 from Ghost Enterprise Suite. Or just
any Ghost version that works reliably for you. Which implies you'll
need to be able to boot the cloned machine into DOS somehow. I'd
recommend making a bootable FreeDOS USB stick (a 1.44MB floppy might
be too small).
If you want to move the contents of two IDE drives onto a single SATA
drive, you can clone the drives per partitions (using Ghost). And, if
you don't make a whole "disk to disk" as a first operation (that would
use the whole destination drive), but start with partition-to-
partition, don't forget to run "fixmbr" on the destination drive to
insert a Windows bootloader into its Master Boot Record (boot the XP
installer CD into the CMDline rescue mode to do that). The
applications on the second IDE drives are probably not vital to the
boot of your XP OS, so they may actually survive some period when the
second drive is not available - you can clone that later (without the
painful procedure described above) or even just copy the files by hand
from within Windows. You may need to change drive letters explicitly
afterwards to match the original scheme, but that should be a piece of
cake. Any applications running on top of Windows will depend strictly
on drive letters to reach their home directory / config / data - so
once you move Windows and the two or three levels of their internal
links from the physical source drive to the physical destination
drive, all the additional apps should automatically move along, as
long as the drive letters match the original scheme (and as long as
the apps don't have a license tied to HDD serial number or something).
Actually some say that, in order to clone a Windows install, you can
just copy the files from an NTFS disk to another NTFS disk, provided
that the target partition has been "formatted" (NTFS filesystem
created) from within Windows (so that the 2nd-stage bootloader is in
the partition's boot sector) and that you run "fixmbr" on the target
drive to get the default bootloader in place. This should probably be
done "out of band", from another windows XP install - you shouldn't
try to clone a Windows install that you've just booted from in this
way
One general recommendation: before you start fiddling with the drives,
make a backup (Ghost images) of the original state of all the source
drives - maybe to a big independent disk drive or two, that will be
put safely aside during the moving exercise. Or, to a RAID-equipped
file server.
Frank Rysanek
