Copying an entire ATA drive to a SATA drive

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I am attempting to put a sata drive WD 1.5 gig in a non sata computer. I have the hardware to make the change but not run both the ata drive and the sata drive at the same time. The lady that owns the computer wants all of the files, including the os (xp) migrated to the bigger harddrive. Not exactly new at computers but have not tried this before. Any suggestions on software to use to move files would be appreciated.

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You either need to have both working on the same system at the same time (an external enclosure or SATA/PATA to USB cable can be used) so you can use cloning software (I’d suggest the 15-day free trial of Acronis True Image) to clone the small drive to the big one, or you need external USB attached storage to which you can save a full backup image of the smaller drive (again, a good job for Acronis) and then restore that image using a boot CD (again, Acronis) once the smaller hard drive is removed and the larger put in place. Assuming you are using a simple SATA/PATA bridge as the hadware interface and XP is SP2 or later, there should be no other issues using the larger drive.

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Thanks, I have the enclosure for both ata and sata and I am downloading the trial version of acronis now. Thanks again for the reply.

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The drive manufacturers have free cloning software on their web sites.

cheers, Paul

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The drive manufacturers have free cloning software on their web sites.

cheers, Paul

If your drive is either a Seagate or Maxtor, the software they provide is actually Acronis True Image, FREE and no expiration.

I’ve been using Ghost, since 1997 and continue to use it today. Version 11.5 will back up or CLONE any hard drive, any make or model, whether NTFS or FAT-32.

I use that from a boot CD or Flash Drive to back up or clone any hard drive, or to do my own weekly all C: drive backup.

I always find whatever I need by remembering an old Bible Quote, “ask and thou shalt receive”.

Have a great day,
The Doctor 🙂

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you can also use the free version of Clonezilla, and make a boot-able CD, best to try and have both drives connected internally, so the boards I/O handles the data transfer, rather than having to go out via the USB controller. If the computer is a non-SATA system, then there is little point in cloning the drive unless you fit a SATA controller. You will also need to adjust the bios to make sure it sees and boots to the new SATA device and not stall looking for an IDE device.

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If the computer is a non-SATA system, then there is little point in cloning the drive unless you fit a SATA controller. You will also need to adjust the bios to make sure it sees and boots to the new SATA device and not stall looking for an IDE device.

Mike indicated he has the hardware to make the change from SATA to IDE, which I assume is a little SATA/IDE bridge that connects between the drive and the IDE ribbon cable. If that’s the case, no other changes are needed and the clone or image transfer will work just fine. I have a couple SATA/IDE bridges in use and the drives look and function as IDE as far as the system is concerned.

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Byron, what he said was had the hardware to make the change, but not to have both connected at the same time, and the fact that he is using an ATA (PATA) drive and SATA drive, i took a guess that it was perhaps an older machine, there is no guarantee that the motherboard has both connectors (he did say a NON-SATA system).

Having an adapter is fine for short term link up for cloning ( i use a 44pin adapter myself in our test bench desktop when we clone laptop drives), but long term use I wouldn’t want to be using adapters (and run in ATA mode), you want to be able to use the full ability of a SATA-II drive on a SATA-II controller (almost twice the performance), hence the controller PCI card suggestion.

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i took a guess that it was perhaps an older machine, there is no guarantee that the motherboard has both connectors (he did say a NON-SATA system).

I took it as a given the board does not have SATA connectors. It would help if Mike let us know if the hardware is in fact a PATA/SATA bridge or a SATA controller card. I agree from a performance standpoint, the PCI controller card is preferred but we also don’t know just how old this system is so there is a possibility the BIOS won’t accomodate booting from SATA emulation on the PCI controller. The PATA/SATA bridge does nothing to improve performance of course but it does just work with a straight clone from the old IDE drive, no fuss.

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Thanks for all the replies. The adapter I am using is a StarTech Pata2Sata2 IDE to SATA Drive Motherboard Adapter. It plugs directly into the IDE connector on the motherboard. Since it uses that connector there is no way, that I can find, to run both the IDE harddrive and the Sata drive at the same time without using the usb port and a usb enclosure. I have tried to put the Sata drive into the enclosure and clone the existing drive to it, but the system will not recognize the sata drive. I put the sata drive in the computer and booted the computer. The bios picked up the new drive as it should but since there is no operating system on the drive naturally it wouldn’t go any further. I put the drive in my main desktop as a second drive, this motherboard supports both sata and pata. The primary drive is pata with Win 7. The system picked up the new drive but only as an ata drive and it does not show up when I open “my computer” but is in the device manager.

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A new drive needs to be initialized and given a drive letter in disc management or it won’t show up in a system, maybe that’s the problem in the main desktop setup.

As for the other system, is there only one IDE connector? Maybe the CD/DVD drive is connected to a second one? That could be utilized for cloning if its there. Otherwise as I mentioned, you’ll need an intermeadiary drive (USB external works best) to place an image of the old drive onto and then swap drives and use a Acronis boot recovery disc that you make to recover the image from the intermeadiary drive, writing it to the new drive instead of actually recovering it to the old one.

If you use an image instead of cloning, you can also prepartition and format the new drive (in the other system) before writing the new image to it. A smaller OS and apps partition may facillitate the process. A 1.5 terabyte partition should still work but I’ve had some I/O difficulties with XP and drives that large, especially the 2 TB drives–once I reduce them to 2, 1 TB partitions, XP got along well with it.

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Did not think of using the 2nd IDE connector. DUH Will give that a try and again thanks for the help.

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When I’ve done this in the past I’ve had great success using Terabyte Unlimited’s CopyWipe (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.php).
Completely free and available in versions that run under Windows (if you’re not copying the Windows drive), make a bootable floppy or CD, or can be added to a bootable BartPE disc.
Automatically resizes the partitions on the old drive to fill the new one.

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I would also like to recommend Clonezilla. For many years I used to rely on Norton Ghost, literally hundreds of times. I still think it’s a great utility but two-three years ago I stopped buying it and have used Clonezilla. It’s free, reliable, and well supported. I’ve had no problems using it ATA to SATA, or transferring an ATA drive to another drive using an USB adapter. No problems cloning drives with multiple operating systems either — all the various partitions and boot record (doesn’t matter if it’s Win Boot Mnger, NTLDR, Grub, Lilo, etc.) will transfer from one drive to another without any issues.

Ghost has better granular control over resizing individual partitions on-the-fly (as in selectively expanding various partitions when going from a smaller drive to a much bigger one), and as far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), Clonezilla doesn’t currently have support for the newer 4k formatting in the latest Western Digital drives, but I’d be surprised if the Clonezilla developers aren’t working on that issue.

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I’ve been a user of Acronis for a long time and would recommend it. You mentioned you have another computer with both SATA and PATA connectors built-in. Why not just unplug the OS drive and any others from that computer, connect the PATA and SATA drives you’re working with and clone one to other with the Acronis bootable CD. Then install your adaptor and then the SATA drive back in the original computer and you should be good to go.

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my virgin post was going to be on a comment that was completely an attempt to build “points” and had nothing in content.

i see it disappeared, and as such, i expect this one to as well. good job editors.

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my virgin post was going to be on a comment that was completely an attempt to build “points” and had nothing in content.

i see it disappeared, and as such, i expect this one to as well. good job editors.

I guess they didn’t like yours, but this one seems to be still here. Good job editors.

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