Question...

Bounty25

Hi , And thank you in advance for reading and providing any useful help.
I just purchased, a complete new system with a 500GB SATA drive.
Is it possible to transfer all my data from my previous IDE drive onto my new system?
Is it possible to connect a IDE to my PCI Motherboard?
Will it act as an external drive?
Do i have to format and re-install windows?


I'm not really good with hardware, so thank you for answering me!

Later

royal

Hi , And thank you in advance for reading and providing any useful help.
I just purchased, a complete new system with a 500GB SATA drive.
Is it possible to transfer all my data from my previous IDE drive onto my new system?
Is it possible to connect a IDE to my PCI Motherboard?
Will it act as an external drive?
Do i have to format and re-install windows?

Retail hard drives will come with utilities to transfer data from one hard drive to another. Check the manufacturer's site. There are some utilities such as Ghost and Acronis who will also provide you with this functionality.

IDE comes in two flavors. SATA and PATA. Typically with PATA, if you didn't want to re-install Windows and just wanted to copy data, I would keep your old drive as master and put in your new drive as slave. I would then use a piece of software such as Ghost and/or Acronis to copy your old drive to the new drive. You could then take out your old drive and put your new one as master. If you were planning on re-installing Windows, I would take out your old drive temporarily, put the new one in as master, install Windows, and after it's all installed, put in the old drive as slave and copy over all the data you need.

If you're using SATA, you don't need to do master or slave. Just put the drive in, select in the BIOS which hard drive should be bootable (think of it as your master drive) and then do the same things I discussed in the last paragraph.

There are hard drive controllers you can plug into the IDE bus. You usually do this to add RAID support if the system you are working on does not support hardware RAID natively. You would also do this if you are running out of hard drive interfaces on your motherboard and you need a way to provide your system with additional internal hard drives.

As for formatting, see my previous paragraph where I discuss IDE.

Hope this helps.