Can I clone an IDE drive to a SATA drive?

[mike]

Got the tivo drive working, thanks again. Loaded XPSP2;
seems to be working fine.

Time to clone the original IDE drive.
I routinely use Acronis 10 to backup IDE system
drives and restore to IDE drives with different
partition geometry.
When I tried to backup an IDE drive and restore
to a SATA drive, it didn't work.

XPSP3 boots as far as the two-tone blue screen with
the xp logo. The screen goes black with mouse cursor.
The cursor moves, but nothing else happens.

I tried booting an XPSP2 CD to run the recovery console,
but it gave a stop error. Messed around with it some more
and tried the XPSP2 CD again. This time I got to the
recovery console and ran fixboot and fixmbr.
Still no joy.
If I try to boot to safe mode, the screen flashes back
and forth between the blue windows screen and the black
safe-mode screen.

I suspect that windows is trying to use the IDE driver
on a SATA disk.
Is there any way to force XP to re-detect hardware before it boots.


I don't have an XPSP3 CD. Always load sp2 disk and update
to sp3. Not sure if this matters. I'd rather not go to the
trouble of slipstreaming SP3 if it's not essential.

So, any suggestions on moving my boot disk from IDE to SATA?
I REEELY don't want to reload all the programs/settings.

 

[GMAN]

Got the tivo drive working, thanks again. Loaded XPSP2;
seems to be working fine.

Time to clone the original IDE drive.
I routinely use Acronis 10 to backup IDE system
drives and restore to IDE drives with different
partition geometry.
When I tried to backup an IDE drive and restore
to a SATA drive, it didn't work.

XPSP3 boots as far as the two-tone blue screen with
the xp logo. The screen goes black with mouse cursor.
The cursor moves, but nothing else happens.

I tried booting an XPSP2 CD to run the recovery console,
but it gave a stop error. Messed around with it some more
and tried the XPSP2 CD again. This time I got to the
recovery console and ran fixboot and fixmbr.
Still no joy.
If I try to boot to safe mode, the screen flashes back
and forth between the blue windows screen and the black
safe-mode screen.

I suspect that windows is trying to use the IDE driver
on a SATA disk.
Is there any way to force XP to re-detect hardware before it boots.


I don't have an XPSP3 CD. Always load sp2 disk and update
to sp3. Not sure if this matters. I'd rather not go to the
trouble of slipstreaming SP3 if it's not essential.

So, any suggestions on moving my boot disk from IDE to SATA?
I REEELY don't want to reload all the programs/settings.

Boot into windows with your IDE drive like normal, install the SATA chipset
drivers in windows. Shut down. Reboot and clone the IDE to SATA. Shut down,
boot with SATA as boot drive.

 

[mike]

Boot into windows with your IDE drive like normal, install the SATA chipset
drivers in windows. Shut down. Reboot and clone the IDE to SATA. Shut down,
boot with SATA as boot drive.

I have run the machine with both drives installed and working. It booted
from the ide drive and the sata was accessible. Doesn't that mean that
it did install the sata drivers?
I think that the problem might be that the IDE drive was C and D,
while the SATA was E and F. When I remove the ide drive, the SATA
is now C and D, but the internal mapping for C and D from the restored
image still points to the "missing" IDE drives?? Boots to the point
where it switches to the
windows drive map and there's nothing there. Windows seems to know
how to sort this out for ide/ide clones, but not for SATA.

It's also an old Dell 4600i. Think this has early SATA support that
may not be up to the latest standards???

I've had similar problems in the past with graphics drivers.
The solution was to uninstall the graphics driver before backing up the
system in vga mode. Don't think this works with disk drivers, because
the system locks up as soon as you remove the driver.

Need a magic bullet to put in runonce to force a rescan of hardware??

This has gotta be a common problem for people who upgrade their computers
with SATA drives. I can't be the first person needing to do this cloning
operation.

 

[Rod Speed]

I have run the machine with both drives installed and working. It
booted from the ide drive and the sata was accessible. Doesn't that
mean that it did install the sata drivers?
I think that the problem might be that the IDE drive was C and D,
while the SATA was E and F. When I remove the ide drive, the SATA
is now C and D, but the internal mapping for C and D from the restored
image still points to the "missing" IDE drives?? Boots to the point
where it switches to the
windows drive map and there's nothing there. Windows seems to know
how to sort this out for ide/ide clones, but not for SATA.

It's also an old Dell 4600i. Think this has early SATA support that
may not be up to the latest standards???

I've had similar problems in the past with graphics drivers.
The solution was to uninstall the graphics driver before backing up
the system in vga mode. Don't think this works with disk drivers,
because the system locks up as soon as you remove the driver.

Need a magic bullet to put in runonce to force a rescan of hardware??

A repair install should fix it.

This has gotta be a common problem for people who upgrade their
computers with SATA drives. I can't be the first person needing to
do this cloning operation.

Yes, it usually goes fine.

 

[mike]

If you clone XP from partition X on one HD to partition Y on another HD,
you have to adjust the "partition()" argument in the boot.ini menu to reflect the
new partition no. (which starts with "1"), and you have to mark as "active"
the partition which contains that boot.ini menu. If you are using the MBR on
the old HD (i.e. the old HD still has the top position in the BIOS's boot
sequence), you have to not only change the partition() value but also the
rdisk() value (which starts with "0") in the boot.ini menu on the old HD (i.e.
on the IDE HD in this case). "rdisk()" represents the relative position in the
boot sequence of the HD that contains the booting partition - the partition
which contains the boot sector and the files ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini.
If you weren't transferring XP from an IDE HD to a SATA HD, you could
just plug the old HD's data cable into the new HD and be done with it, since
the new HD would then be in the position at the top of the boot sequence.
But since the data cables are different for the IDE and SATA HDs, you have
to understand the syntax of boot.ini, the meaning of "boot sequence" and how
to set it in the BIOS, and the meaning of being the "active" partition and how
to set that. Are you sure you want to go through that, or would you settle for
just using another IDE HD?

*TimDaniels*

I don't have any problem going through "all that". Problem is determining
what "all that" is.

I think we're still on different pages.
The SATA drive starts to boot. It gets all the way to the "loading
personal settings" part before the screen goes blank.

I tried randomly changing numbers in the boot.ini file.
In every case, I got error messages about missing files and/or
"reload windows".
I'm not convinced that the problem is in boot.ini, 'cause it gets way
past that in the boot sequence.

I had a similar problem years ago with win98 and a boot manager that
munged the registry to swizzle the drive letters. That way, you
couldhave three C: drives and one common D: drive. I could multi-boot
and every boot drive came up as c:, correctly linked to the common d:>
I could clone
partitions and boot without incident. Anyway, if that got screwed up,
the system would boot up to the point where it looked into the registry,
found the corrupt value and tried to execute from nowhere.

This sata problem feels just like that. It gets FAR into the boot process
before it just hangs.

I've been googling for two days. I find lots of incidences of my exact
problem, but no real solutions. It's been suggested that a repair install
might fix it. Problem with a repair install is that it doesn't work.
For example, if you have microsoft office installed, it won't work after
a repair install. Maintaining the license info on licensed products
is one of the main reasons to want to clone rather than reinstall.
YMMV
mike

 

[Rod Speed]

I don't have any problem going through "all that". Problem is
determining what "all that" is.

I think we're still on different pages.
The SATA drive starts to boot. It gets all the way to the "loading
personal settings" part before the screen goes blank.

I tried randomly changing numbers in the boot.ini file.
In every case, I got error messages about missing files and/or
"reload windows".
I'm not convinced that the problem is in boot.ini, 'cause it gets way
past that in the boot sequence.

I had a similar problem years ago with win98 and a boot manager that
munged the registry to swizzle the drive letters. That way, you
couldhave three C: drives and one common D: drive. I could multi-boot and every boot drive came up as c:, correctly
linked to
the common d:> I could clone
partitions and boot without incident. Anyway, if that got screwed up,
the system would boot up to the point where it looked into the
registry, found the corrupt value and tried to execute from nowhere.

This sata problem feels just like that. It gets FAR into the boot
process before it just hangs.

I've been googling for two days. I find lots of incidences of my
exact problem, but no real solutions. It's been suggested that a
repair install might fix it. Problem with a repair install is that
it doesn't work.

For example, if you have microsoft office installed, it won't work after a repair install.

Thats just plain wrong. I have done that a number of times.

Maintaining the license info on licensed products is one of the main reasons to want to clone rather than reinstall.

No one was suggesting a reinstall. And a reinstall works fine if you have
licensed products anyway, its just a lot more work than a repair install.

 

[mm]

So, any suggestions on moving my boot disk from IDE to SATA?
I REEELY don't want to reload all the programs/settings.

It's a long post and rather than read it again, Are you planning to
use the SATA drive in the same computer which now holds the IDE drive?

I think you are saying Yes.

If so, use XXClone. It's designed for just this. XXCopy worked for
win98, but something is different about XP, so XXClone was written.

It's even free for personal use, but for 40 dollars they will include
incremental updates and one other thing. For free it only does full
drive clones.

www.xxclone.com plus it has a google list to discuss problems. XXCopy
has a yahoo list.