copying and replacing hard drive difficulties

[mr.bones]

Hello people! I am new to the forum and need help. I have little knowledge of computers other than what I learn on the fly. What I am attempting to do is copy my old 30GB maxtor ATA HD onto a new Seagate Barracuda SATA 300GB HD. I bought an adapter PCI card to hook up the new HD. It formatted, saved data and retrieved data. Now I have used HDClone to copy my old HD to the new HD. The data all seems to be there and is accessable and I have been able to assign the new HD a letter (E:).

What I want to do is use the new HD as the primary drive and boot from it, but I can't figure it out. The BIOS does not recognize that there is a second HD. Below are the details of what my computer is. Any help would be greatly apprciated.

Thanks, Scott
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) Intel Corporation
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.40 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Board: Intel Corporation D845GERG2 AAA97835-107
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: Intel Corp. RG84510A.86A.0028.P15.0302260937 02/26/2003
Drives
350.80 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
290.92 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

SONY DVD RW DRU-800A [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 6E030L0 [Hard drive] (30.75 GB) -- drive 0, s/n E17XYADE, rev NAR61590, SMART Status: Healthy
ST332062 0AS SCSI Disk Device (320.07 GB) -- drive 1 2046

Local Drive Volumes

c: (NTFS on drive 0) 30.74 GB 774 MB free
e: (NTFS on drive 1) 320.06 GB 290.15 GB free

Network Drives
None detected

[edwin]

Maxtor 6E030L0 [Hard drive] (30.75 GB) -- drive 0, s/n E17XYADE, rev NAR61590, SMART Status: Healthy
ST332062 0AS SCSI Disk Device (320.07 GB) -- drive 1 2046

You need to set the bios to boot from the SCSI controller card. SATA cards are treated the same way as SCSI cards in the bios.

[mr.bones]

You make that sound soooo easy (and I know it probably is), but I can't seem to figure it out. I looked in the bios and there doesn't seem to be any place to change it to read the SCSI card. Any other help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Scott

[Denniss]

Several problems with cloning your harddrive:
1) Your SATA-Controller has to bee bootable thus has to have it's own Bios. There are several el'cheapo cards out without a Bios thus are not bootable.
2) If you get your SATA card to boot then your OS won't start because of of a changed IDE controller - it tries to boot the intel controller but now has a SATA controller.

Better use your old drive for the operating system and the SATA drive for Data/programs/games/whatever or you need to reinstall your OS from scrach.

[mr.bones]

Thanks for the info. Just so I know I understand what you've said I am going to say it back. If I got a cheap sata card (and I probably did-EBay), it doesn't have its own bios and will not be able to become the boot drive as it is configured now (leave it as is and use e: drive for data, etc.). If I start from scratch, remove the old drive and only have the new one, the new drive with the cheap sata card can be the boot drive? would I need to format the new drive to clean off the stuff I just put on it or will it happen automatically with installing the new OS?

Thanks again, Scott

[aesmith]

mr. bones,

I had the same situation as you, and spent way too many hours trying to make the new cloned SATA drive work. I ended up doing a fresh install of the OS onto the SATA drive, and it booted and ran fine. Of course, you will have to reinstall all drivers and programs manually, so you may want to download all those from your manufacturer first in a specific folder on the old drive or on the new drive after you get it running.

Hope that helps.