New HDD - Copying OK?

[MattyD]

So I've just taken delivery of a new SATA hard disc. I'm going to be using it to totally replace the IDE drive I have in my rig right now as my MB, being fairly recent, only has one IDE socket and I've had to double up the DVD and HDD on one cable.

I was just wondering if there's any reason why I wouldn't be able to just copy the contents of my current HDD in their entirety onto this new drive, adjust the BIOS and boot up from the new, copied drive? It would certainly beat spending all evening backing up and re-installing my data but I have a horrible feeling it won't be that simple...

[kernow]

is it the system drive? i.e it has windows and everything on?

You could get a program like norton ghost, and image your system, then try re-imaging it onto the new disk, but really you're better off reinstalling windows.

if its not a system drive but just a storage/data drive, by all means copy the files to the new one.

[smouty]

Imaging an IDE to SATA system disk may not work as the mass storage controller driver is different. Some SATA controllers can be set to legacy mode so would use the same driver as the IDE disk.

[MattyD]

I've downloaded some freeware that does a straight 1-for-1 sector copy of your HDD, which is basically the same thing as Norton Ghost does. Is that not going to work because the drive types are different?

EDIT - I should add that I'm running Vista 64. After looking on Google it seems you can't do this with XP because it needs special SATA drivers, but I assume Vista has them built in since it's recent.

[Dirty Sanchez]

Personally I'd partition the new drive up and install a fresh copy of vista on it, then just copy over all your data.

After going through a whole heap of pain with something similar you may find you'll end up doing this after x attempts anyway.

[MattyD]

Will all my Steam games work if I do that? I just can't face downloading all those again TBH, it would take me literally days ;_;

[kernow]

I doubt they will, they probably install a lot to the registry and won't work on a new windows system.

[Bort]

You can backup steam games data. Right click a game and select backup.

In the past I've just straight copied the files to the correct directory and it just used them once checking them but it was a lot time ago. They might have changed things since.

[MattyD]

Yeah I thought about that. If this disc ghosting utility doesn't work I'll just back up my games, install Steam again and then let it re-install from the back-ups.

[Strolls]

I've downloaded some freeware that does a straight 1-for-1 sector copy of your HDD, which is basically the same thing as Norton Ghost does. Is that not going to work because the drive types are different?

It's definitely worth a go.

As Smouty says, some SATA controllers can use legacy mode and in this case Windows will use some generic ATA drivers. You may have to select this in BIOS. If you manage to get the o/s booting then you'll be asked to install the full drivers for the SATA controller (and may be able to disable legacy mode in BIOS).

I have this idea that I've managed to do this myself, but I can't swear to it for sure. I would boot to a Linux CD and use the `dd` command, but that's just a "1-for-1 sector copy" as you describe.

If the cloned disk, the new SATA drive, doesn't work, you may be able to do a repair install and get it working. Then apply any service packs that are not already part of your Windows XP installation CD.

Stroller.

[MattyD]

I've just booted my PC up using the new, cloned HDD and it worked first time with no problems at all

It was actually pretty straight-forward to do, or would have been if not for some instance-specific problems (more on that in a moment).

I downloaded a small shareware program called HDClone from majorgeeks.com. You just need to make a boot disc on a CD/DVD-R, load it up and do a straight clone. It also lets you adjust partitions once the cloning is done, which is handy if you are say cloning a smaller HDD to a newer, bigger one. There were dozens of similar programs, some of which were free (this has lots of its features locked unless you buy the full version).

The only problem I had is, although both drives are rated as 80Gb, the new one has 2GB or so less capacity. Presumably it's down to space needed for the file tables or some such. This meant I couldn't do a simple 1-for-1 copy without some work first - HDD heads just write data wherever they happen to be so I could have lost important data stored on the outer edges of the disc.

I got around this by downloading an excellent freeware program called Defraggler. Not only is it better than the built-in Vista program, but it's got some handy features like letting you consolidate your data in various different ways, one of which is to prioritise the consolidation of free space. Since my drive was only about half full I ran this and got all the data to store in one big lump on the inside tracks of the disc before copying.

All the faffing around was a bit of a headache and each stage of the task took a good two to three hours a piece, but it was nothing compared to the pain of having to manually re-install and re-configure everything, including the extensive Vista optimisations I've done.

[Strolls]

Did you also resize the partition smaller? It rather doesn't make sense to me that it would work without that.