New drive quandry
 

My C: drive is becoming overcrowded. Even with installing to a second drive, I find that with overhead, multiple user, etc., I am having to do more cleanups. My original drive is 40GB with 32GB for C: and 8GB used as a restore partition.

I currently have two IDE drives on a single cable. I found some great deals, including a 1TB drive for under $90, but everything on sale seems to be SATA. The IDE drives seem to cost twice as much or I get half as much storage for the price.

I do not think that I have a PCI slot left for a SATA controller, and I'm not sure how my 4-5 year old Compaq would handle a SATA primary drive.

I have a larger (about 190GB) IDE internal backup drive in an external case. My options are to:

1) Swap the 40GB and 190GB drives, and buy a replacement external drive.

2) Buy the 1TB internal, and purchase a SATA to IDE adapter

Does anyone have any experience using these adapters?

SATA to IDE is fail
 

Rich,

I've used that adapter. It's good for plugging in old IDE CD/DVD drives into SATA devices. It's not good for the other way around. I have used this adapter with a WiebeTech SATA Forensic DriveDock to read IDE hard drives with a write blocker, but that's it.

The other way around (IDE to SATA) has major issues. Those devices are only designed for optical drives as well, and I have never gotten one to work right. Yes, I had one of those too.

Get a USB 2.0 external drive case which supports SATA drives. You'll be much happier.

You mentioned the words Compaq BIOS as well, or as I like to put it, a completely neutered and crippled one that may not support that SATA PCI card, and definitely won't support a SATA boot drive 100%. Heck, their BIOS setups have problems with USB boot drives.

Swap the drives :).

Mitch

It looks like I am getting another external. I had a 'real' external, meaning not an internal drive in an external case. Unfortunately, it was smaller than the internal drive I want to pull to use as my C: drive.

I went to order the 1TB Seagate USB/Firewire/eSata external from Staples that was on sale for $99, but, big surprise, they were out of stock and no holds or rainchecks apply. They have it backordered and it may come in before the sale is off at the end of the week.

Assuming I can get a large external soon, I will need to plan out how I will image my C:/D: drive (D: is a small partition with restore software on it) onto a larger drive. I am rummaging through my disk tools. I know this has to be done in DOS since you cannot copy many Windows files while Windows is running.

This should be fun.

Ultimate Boot CD
 

Rich,

Use the imaging tools on there. We've customized this at work to use the Altiris imaging agent, but this one comes with several tools for imaging drives (Drive Image XML), and can also use Ghost with a plug-in.

I've also used the GParted Live CD to copy over hard drives to larger partitions. It works quite well actually if all you want to do is re-image the drive onto a larger partition.

Mitch

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