Replacing an IDE Drive with a SATA Drive

I’ve decided to add more hard drive space to one of my desktop computers, so I bought a Seagate 1 TB SATA hard drive for it.

At the same time, I need more hard drive space in my Linux computer which I use for file storage, i.e. backup of my other computers.

The complication was that I don’t have a SATA adapter in my Linux box, although I could easily order one from NewEgg, where I buy most of my parts.

My solution was a multi-step process:

1. I installed the new 1 GB SATA drive temporarily as an external drive using a
   Thermaltake N0028USU External Enclosure
   . This is a neat piece of equipment for anyone who needs to temporarily connect hard drives — it’s a plug-and-play adapter with a slot on the top that can take a full-sized 3.5″ SATA drive or a notebook-size SATA drive. Plus, unlike all the adapters of the IDE world, it looks good <grin>
2. I inserted the bare drive into the slot in the top of the Thermaltake adapter, plugged it into a power connection, plugged the USB 2.0 cable to the desktop computer and powered on the Thermaltake unit. [It took longer to write that than it did to do it!]
3. Windows immediately recognized the drive and configured itself.
4. I formatted the new drive as one big NTFS partition.
5. I copied the contents of an existing 320 GB SATA drive to the new 1 TB drive.
6. Then, I deleted the contents of the 320 GB SATA drive.
7. Now, I started thinking about how to use the empty drive in my old Linux system, and I realized that I did not have a SATA adapter in it. The computer has an old Pentium III 933MHz processor, so that’s way to old for SATA to have been built into the motherboard. Of course, I could add an adapter, so I didn’t worry too much.
8. But, I realized that I could use the 320 GB SATA drive to replace an existing 200 GB IDE drive in the desktop. Now, things started to get tricky.
9. First, the old SATA drive was one big partition. No problem, but I wanted to configure it similarly to that of the IDE drive, which had my D:, H: and I: drives. So, my first step was to delete the partition.
10. I started the Windows XP Disk Management console by Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc<enter>
11. That showed me all the drives that were connected and allowed me to select the drive and gave me the option to delete the partition.
12. That’s where I hit a problem — although the drive was empty, Windows would not let me delete the partition. The option was not greyed-out, but when I tried it, Windows told me the partition was in use. It gave me the option to force the deletion, though.
13. I rebooted and immediately retried tot delete the partition, to see if that would solve it. It didn’t, so I selected the option to force the deletion, which did ok.
14. I also wanted to make the new drive use the same drive letters that were current in use on the IDE drive (D:, H: and I:), so I used another feature of the Disk Management console to change the drive letters on the IDE drive to S:, T: and U:. Windows told me that it could make the change, but that it wouldn’t really occur until I rebooted, so I proceeded and then rebooted.
15. Now, I created the FAT32 D: partition on the SATA drive to replace the FAT32 partition on the old IDE drive. As part of creating the partition, I had to select the drive letter that I wanted the Disk Management console to assign, so I picked D:. Windows created the partition and immediately began formatting it.
16. Then, based on the content of H: and I: (now T: and U:), I decided to combine their data into one partition. I created a single NTFS partition out of the rest of the drive and assigned it drive letter H:. Windows formatted it automatically as part of the creation step.
17. Finally, I used one of my daily tools Karen’s Replicator to copy the files from the old D: (now S:) to the new D: and the old H: and I: (now T: and U:) to the new H:. Karen’s Replicator has a huge advantage over using Windows Explorer to copy files. If there is any problem, Windows Explorer just stops without warning and often without any message. Karen’s Replicator keeps a log of its activities and will log what went wrong, and then continue with the next file.

Now, with all my data moved around, I can open the case, remove the IDE drive and insert the 1 TB SATA drive — and be finished!