Thinking about getting new hard drives, do I have to reinstall everything?

[Jayce]

I was just thinking about something. I thought about getting a pair of SATA drives to mirror one another, but I was wondering if it would be possible to copy over what's on my 200gb Maxtor IDE drive. Would it be at all possible to hook up one, or even both of the new SATA drives I plan to get, and have an auto-copy of the 200gb Maxtor drive? Then, start from there with the mirroring, and ditch the 200gb Maxtor drive. Is that possible? Or is a brand new installation required?

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Typiccally yes you could, but I am not to sure about your paticular situation. Usually you can what they call "clone" a hard drive with a 3rd party piece cloning of software (Norton Ghost, Trueimage etc) from your current drive to the new drive.

Now reason number one why it would'nt work for you is because if you wish to truely mirror them like with a RAID setup you would have to blow out your current partitions to setup the RAID. Actually I dont know if thats true with a mirror setup..usually you do though.

The 2nd reason and I only know this cause I recently did some testing with various hard drives and disk cloning software. Is because its almost impossible to clone from an IDE interface to a SATA interface. Let me rephrase that. In my testing I actually made "images" which I tried to restore to the various platforms, but actually never attempted a disk to disk, but I think it would still have the same problems.

I couldnt swing it either way either going from IDE to SATA or from SATA to IDE.

 

[Jayce]

But was that clone just a one time thing, or were you trying to set up an actual raid format to mirror everything the drive does?

All I need is for the new hard drive(s) to copy over what's on the current 200gb IDE drive. Operating system, music, games, etc. I'd really rather not have to reinstall everything. If I have to do that, I'll just get a single IDE drive and copy my stuff over. All I want is for a backup of my music/music videos/school files, etc. That way if my 200gb drive goes, I at least have a backup with the important stuff. I could care less about having to redownload my virus scanner and sh*t like that.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Hmmm...you could always get 2 IDE drives and mirror that would be easy to do. If you really want is a backup though I would simply buy one more hard drive clone your current hard drive to it and keep it stored away not plugged into the PC. Then every month or so just simply clone over it an updated version. This is basically what I do at home.

 

[Jayce]

Hmmm...you could always get 2 IDE drives and mirror that would be easy to do. If you really want is a backup though I would simply buy one more hard drive clone your current hard drive to it and keep it stored away not plugged into the PC. Then every month or so just simply clone over it an updated version. This is basically what I do at home.

What's the purpose of unplugging it and taking it out of the computer? I'd just do what I do now, keep it as a slave drive. I have a 20 gig IBM drive as a slave, only because it's an extra drive and I figured I'd use it. Think is, 20 gig's isn't a lot of space for music, music videos, and pictures. I'd like to get 80 MINIMUM, but preferably at least 120 gig for the spare/slave.