Migrating Operating System from a PATA drive to a SATA drive.

Currently I am running all PATA drives. The operating system drive is
failing and I will be taking delivery of a large SATA drive to replace
it.

I do not wish to go through the *** of re-installing the operating
system and all the associated programs (the last time took the best part
of a week of spare time).

I propose to use either Norton Ghost 2003 or a Seagate tool to copy the
whole disk across. My query is about installing the SATA drivers.

Can I safely install these before copying the disk, even though I do not
currently have a SATA drive installed and boot from a PATA drive.
Having copied the disk across the intention is then to boot from the new
SATA drive?

There are two other PATA drives which will remain in place.

Motherboard: AX8
Operating System: Windows XP Pro (SP2)
File Systems: NTFS
--
Nicholas David Richards -

"Où sont les neiges d'antan?"

Before you "clone" your PATA drive to your SATA drive install the SATA
drivers....it is safe to do so.
Dont forget to change the BIOS settings so that you will be booting from the
SATA drive and after the clone is complete unhook your PATA drive for the
1st boot to succeed with SATA.
peter
"Nicholas D. Richards" <nicholas@salmiron.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:WcYIWgAMDUAHFA14@salmiron.co.uk...
> Currently I am running all PATA drives. The operating system drive is
> failing and I will be taking delivery of a large SATA drive to replace
> it.
>
> I do not wish to go through the *** of re-installing the operating
> system and all the associated programs (the last time took the best part
> of a week of spare time).
>
> I propose to use either Norton Ghost 2003 or a Seagate tool to copy the
> whole disk across. My query is about installing the SATA drivers.
>
> Can I safely install these before copying the disk, even though I do not
> currently have a SATA drive installed and boot from a PATA drive.
> Having copied the disk across the intention is then to boot from the new
> SATA drive?
>
> There are two other PATA drives which will remain in place.
>
> Motherboard: AX8
> Operating System: Windows XP Pro (SP2)
> File Systems: NTFS
> --
> Nicholas David Richards -
>
> "Où sont les neiges d'antan?"

"Nicholas D. Richards" <nicholas@salmiron.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:WcYIWgAMDUAHFA14@salmiron.co.uk...
> Currently I am running all PATA drives. The operating system drive is
> failing and I will be taking delivery of a large SATA drive to replace
> it.
>
> I do not wish to go through the *** of re-installing the operating
> system and all the associated programs (the last time took the best part
> of a week of spare time).
>
> I propose to use either Norton Ghost 2003 or a Seagate tool to copy the
> whole disk across. My query is about installing the SATA drivers.
>
> Can I safely install these before copying the disk, even though I do not
> currently have a SATA drive installed and boot from a PATA drive.
> Having copied the disk across the intention is then to boot from the new
> SATA drive?
>
> There are two other PATA drives which will remain in place.
>
> Motherboard: AX8
> Operating System: Windows XP Pro (SP2)
> File Systems: NTFS
> --
> Nicholas David Richards -
>
> "Où sont les neiges d'antan?"

As long as you install the SATA drivers first it should work.

I just did the same thing on an Asus board using BootitNG, (very handy and
free to use for partition work).

I just had to make the SATA drive active and was able to boot straight into
it.