Help a newb: simple issue with hard drive copying?

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AppleBag

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Hello all,

I apologize beforehand for the long description, but I just like to be thorough. :)

I just purchased a new pc. The old hard drive was failing (making noises and skipping reads), so I want to copy all the partitions from it to the partitions on my new hard drive.

The new pc is Vista and is set as the bootable with a SATA drive. Here is my problem. The old drive is IDE and bootable as well (XP with A Mandrake secondary partition that was selectable on boot). When I plug the old drive into the IDE connection and boot it up, the old IDE drive (instead of the new Vista drive which is the one I want) is wanting to take over the boot, and shows me the original OS selection menu with only XP and Mandrake as the options. Choosing XP (as a test) just takes me to a BSOD.

I have set the jumper on the old IDE drive as Slave, but it didn't change anything. I am thinking of trying the CS jumper setting, but I believe that setting either Slave or CS only matters if both drives are on the same cable? (Could be wrong). And since one is using SATA and one IDE, they are not the same cable.

I also don't want to spend too much time with the bad drive running because I really have no idea how many minutes/hours it has left, and I don't want to lose data, so every second it's running is crucial! :)

I simply want to be able to boot into Vista, and have it set the partitions, including the original C: bootable partition as new drive letters on my vista system. Which I will then use some partition cloning tools to transfer the data to the new drive.

PLEASE HELP!! :)

Huge thanks in advance.
 
an easier way to choose boot priority should be in your bios setting....and may be your only bet...
 
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