P4C800-E Deluxe and SATA

[Jdr]

I know this sounds silly, but I have this project on my hands.
I have on a new P4C800-E Deluxe main board and an oldish
hard drive with fresh installed Windows XP Pro on it.

Now I wonder whether it would be possible to swap the old hard drive
ATA on a new SATA drive and transfer to it Windows XP from
the old ATA drive, making it bootable as a drive C: should be?

Theoretically it should be possible. But practically I have only vague
idea but no practice. Is there anyone who already has done it?
If so, could you share with me your experience please.

What is the best way to do it - how to set up SATA
for this main board?

Thanks -

Joe

 

[DaveW]

You CANNOT transfer Windows from another computer with a different
motherboard into this system and expect it to boot.
Whenever you change the motherboard that a a harddrive with Windows has been
used with, you HAVE to reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the
OS. Otherwise you will experience data corruption and nasty Registry
errors.

 

[Jdr]

Thanks DaveW,

So far I managed to get on one main board two hard disks, one old ATA, with
Windows XP installed from fresh - and the second drive SATA 250GB.
Using Ghost I cloned the drive ATA C:\ to drive SATA D:\ making it
bootable. And it works up to a point when Windows XP opens ...
and it stuck... I check the BIOS setting and configured it as it
should be - removed an old C:\ drive - but still - I cannot
get any further. So far no errors shown. I'm still working on it...;-)
If you have any further comments - I'll try to implement them.

JDR

 

[David]

Well this is not quite true.
In many cases you can delete all your drivers just before closing windows.
Then put this hard drive in your new machine with its new motherboard.
Then boot with your original CD and do a repair install.
XP will look at all the new stuff and that becomes the new HAL.

Has worked for me on many occasions.
Now to mirror the old drive to the new one will need some software like
Snapshot, Ghost etc.
No need to re format.
d

 

[max]

Well this is not quite true.
In many cases you can delete all your drivers just before closing windows.
Then put this hard drive in your new machine with its new motherboard.
Then boot with your original CD and do a repair install.
XP will look at all the new stuff and that becomes the new HAL.

Has worked for me on many occasions.
Now to mirror the old drive to the new one will need some software like
Snapshot, Ghost etc.
No need to re format.

The easiest way is to boot to the XP CD and do a repair install. I
recently swapped a friend's HD into a completely different box when
his MB died. It wouldn't boot at all, but I did a repair install and
it came right back up.

I'd recommend having a TrueImage or Ghost backup first, just in case.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324465

If you don't have Repair Install as an option, you need to fix
boot.ini from the recovery console. The command to use in the
recovery console is "bootcfg \rebuild".

There's another technique that's a lot more complicated. I haven't
tried it, but here's the web page:
http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html

max

 

[Flasherly]

Do it all the time - I've been from a mobile XP 2.4 to celeron D to a64
on the same OS in the past 30 days' updates. I do dualboots when
ghosting, and safemoded Nforce 3 drivers from a 765 Intel onto a NF250g
chipset. Forgot already which the mobile was last on (ran a little
while on both an abit an asus). Though I've never booted SATA and
leave it alone (storage), as I prefer working my HDs through PATA
during the interim, what you're proposing seems a suitable BIOS
provision XP ought not mind.

 

[Jdr]

As I mentioned - I am in a situation from which I cannot find
any solution so far. My new "ghosted" SATA drive is in tact.
Windows boots fine up to the point "setting your personal"
configuration - and it stuck. Sometimes two three resets will
do the trigger. But sometime it waits for more that 20 minutes
and I have no idea what's the reason.
The old ATA drive still works fine and boots OK.
I am puzzled.

Jdr

 

[Jdr]

In the I went for a reinstallation of Windows.
Everything went smoothly. Must say there is
a difference between work of SATA and ATA hard drive.

Thanks to ALL for you help and responses to my query.

JD Ross