Question on adding a hard drive

[MVSdinosaur]

I am going to be ordering a new hard drive this Friday, either the 500Gb SATA barracuda or the 320Gb. My current drive is a 36 Gb IDE that I pirated from my old dell.

Anyway, what I want to do is make the SATA drive my primary drive, with the OS.

From what I have read here, the way to go about this is to completely remove the current drive, install the new sata drive and load the OS, and then re-install the old drive. I have to put the old drive back in so that I can xfer all my data to the new one.

So my question is if this is the correct route to go - remove the IDE, install the SATA, load the OS, and then reinstall the IDE.

Lastly, currently the IDE drive and my DVD burner are on the same ribbon cable. Should the master/slave settings remain the same, or do they become irellevant since the SATA will now be the bootable drive?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Sparkyy]

You would be correct on that assumption to just remove the old hard drive, install SATA and get that going so that Windows works and then reinstall the IDE back once Windows is functional.
Also a tid bit, when installed the OS on to the SATA drive, make sure it comes up as C drive, if you have any card readers installed they might take the C and give your hard drive something like E.

You can keep the Master and Slave the same on IDE since SATA does not rely on that nor will it matter since it is the boot drive. However I would suggest you putting the hard drive and DVD burner on different IDE channels if you can. Having a DVD burner on with a hard drive might make the hard drive operate in PIO mode instead of DMA.

 

[MVSdinosaur]

Thanks. I went ahead and ordered the Western Digital Caviar 500GB from NewEgg. Hopefully I won't run out of space anytime soon.

 

[r-486]

Place the PATA drive as primary master and the DVD as secondary master. Putting both on the same cable will make the HDD slower. If you only have one cable, then put the HDD as primary master and the optical drive as primary slave.

I highly doubt the new drive will be labeled anything other than "C". If it does, then you can always easily change it.

If I were you, I would transfer all the crap on the old IDE drive to the new SATA drive, and then format the IDE drive with GParted or whatever. You could then transfer everything back to the old one with no OS taking up space.