Best of these 3 options to clone old IDE hard drive from LGA478 XP system while preserving OS

[capt_taco]

Background: This is a circa 11 year old prebuilt Windows XP computer that's down in the garage. (Frys model FM7640, LGA478.) I mainly keep it because it has copies of about 30-40 games from the late 80s through mid-90s installed on it - many of those original disks, as well as the Windows recovery disc, were lost in a move a long time ago. Recently the hard drive has gotten slow and very noisy, a sure sign of trouble. However, due to the above, I want to preserve an exact mirror copy, not reinstall everything, because I can't reinstall most of it.

I'm pretty confident I could do this no problem on a modern machine, but this is going back so far that it's fairly likely I'll "trip" over something if I just go ahead. Also, the motherboard (ECS 865G-M) has both IDE and SATA ports, so if possible I'm aiming to end up with everything on a new(ish) SATA drive, simply for ease of replacing or transferring anything in the future.

Seems like the three choices are:

1. Set up a RAID1 array - however, that's not supported natively by the motherboard, and the fact that it's IDE seems to complicate things using a PCI RAID controller. Lots of people reporting driver conflicts and not being able to boot at all. I probably do not want to risk that.

2. Plug in a new SATA drive on the existing machine and clone with software. Three concerns here: Crossing the IDE/SATA divide (I think setting the SATA ports to IDE emulation in the BIOS should prevent boot issues with a mirror copy), cloning a live OS while it's "in motion," and finding an XP-compatible tool. This is going so far back that I am not 100% on any of those three.

3. Remove the hard drive, and plug both it and a new SATA drive into a slightly newer LGA775 Vista machine with a legacy IDE port on its motherboard (Asus P5E3 Pro). Use software utility to copy from there, one secondary drive to another. Seems like the safest option, but any recommendations on which utility?

I haven't got the replacement hard drive yet, but since the old one is 160GB and I don't plan on using the machine to do anything but play existing games, another 160GB drive is probably going to do just fine.

 

[USAFRet]

Option 3.

Or, option #4 - Find replacements of those old games. Win 7 or 8 and DOSBox and they'll run just fine.

 

[capt_taco]

Option 3.

Or, option #4 - Find replacements of those old games. Win 7 or 8 and DOSBox and they'll run just fine.

That was the first thing I looked into, but it would probably run me close to $200 for the main ones, and a few of the more obscure ones have gotten "rare" and consequently expensive. A lot of them already were running on DOSBox even on that machine.

Come to think of it, a lot of those DOS games are so old that just brute-force copying their entire directories 1:1 to a DVD and then to a different machine might work. Worth a shot, at least. The newer stuff would still be stuck, though.

In any case, any particular recommendation for a program to do the cloning?

 

[USAFRet]

In any case, any particular recommendation for a program to do the cloning?

CloneZilla, Acronis True Image, DriveimageXML.

 

[capt_taco]

OK, thanks. Sounds like it doesn't really matter which if I'm using option #3 instead of option #2.

Appreciate the help - while I generally feel like I know my way around computers, it's good to have some confirmation for something like this.

 

[Paperdoc]

Option 3 is good, I agree (but see my note of caution in item 1). I will offer five points to help.

1. Win XP does not know how to use SATA drives unless it is installed with appropriate drivers, and your old XP on the IDE drive surely was not. So you WILL have to set your old machine's SATA Port Mode to IDE Emulation. This limits the port to behaving like a true IDE HDD that Win XP does handle just fine. HOWEVER, there may be a tricky bit in Option 3, where you plan to make the clone on a different machine. On that machine when you're doing this, can you set it to use IDE Emulation on the SATA port you'll use for this new drive? If not, you may not be able to make the clone on that second machine.

2. Win XP in its first original version did NOT have a feature called "48-bit LBA Support" necessary to use HDD's over 128 GB (Windows counting method) or 137 GB (HDD makers' rating method). That was added with Service Pack 1 and all versions thereafter. So as long as you have at least SP1 on the Win XP on the old HDD, you're OK to use any HDD size you like. By the way, last time I tried to buy a small HDD I could not find one smaller than 160 GB - I don't know how small they are now.

3. You can download and use free cloning utilities from some HDD makers' websites, so this free tool MAY affect your buying decision. In fact, the HDD makers hope that their offer WILL influence you. If you buy from WD, get their Acronis True Image WD Edition and use its cloning features. If you buy from Seagate, get their utility Disk Wizard. Each will make a clone only TO their supplier's drives - they don't care what old one you are abandoning.

4.When you do the cloning operation the very first step is for you to specify the Source and Destination HDD units. Make very sure you get these right! Anything on the Destination unit will be destroyed and replaced.

5. In making the clone copy to a new HDD of a larger size, watch for something. The first step the cloning utility does in its work is to Create and Format a Partition to receive the clone. In my experience, many will default to making this new Partition the SAME size at the old one, whereas you probably want to use ALL of the new HDD's capacity in one large volume. So, when the software presents you with a set of recommended settings for the job, do NOT just agree! Use the menus to change the size of the new HDD's Partition to what you want. For this and other purposes, it's always a good idea to read through the manual document that comes with the software utility so you know where to find these features!

 

[capt_taco]

Option 3 is good, I agree (but see my note of caution in item 1). I will offer five points to help.

1. Win XP does not know how to use SATA drives unless it is installed with appropriate drivers, and your old XP on the IDE drive surely was not. So you WILL have to set your old machine's SATA Port Mode to IDE Emulation. This limits the port to behaving like a true IDE HDD that Win XP does handle just fine. HOWEVER, there may be a tricky bit in Option 3, where you plan to make the clone on a different machine. On that machine when you're doing this, can you set it to use IDE Emulation on the SATA port you'll use for this new drive? If not, you may not be able to make the clone on that second machine.

Ah, thanks - that's exactly the kind of thing I may have "tripped" on. The newer machine where I'll be making the clone does not appear to have IDE emulation on its SATA ports.

However, shouldn't that still be OK, since it's only being used to transfer data to a blank drive? If I was trying to boot the cloned drive to XP from the newer machine I can see it causing potential problems, but I won't be doing that.

One other thing worth mentioning: As I've been reading up on XP and SATA, some sources say XP Service Pack 3 added the necessary drivers for SATA support. This machine has all the XP updates through the very end, including SP3; I plugged it in on the last day before Microsoft discontinued support and made sure it installed everything. (It has since been physically disconnected from the Internet and I intend to keep it that way.)

So in theory, it might even be possible to just plug the new drive into the SATA port as-is (no IDE emulation) and see what happens? Or, since the OS was originally installed on an IDE drive, perhaps it will still "think" of itself as being on an IDE drive and won't work as SATA. See, those are the kinds of things I just don't know; I've dealt with dozens and dozens of hard drives live and dead in the past 10 years or so, but never had this particular situation come up.

 

[Paperdoc]

AFAIK, NO version of Win XP contained a "built-in" driver for SATA (or, more properly, AHCI) devices. You have to make a careful distinction here. Virtually all mobos that contain SATA ports also provide on their support CD's as part of their device driver collection an AHCI device driver for Win XP. Like all other such drivers, this one can be installed into Win XP that is ALREADY installed and running, so that you can begin to use this new device. BUT this drive is only loaded AFTER Win XP has loaded itself from the HDD. Thus it does NOT allow you to BOOT from an AHCI device. In the case of an AHCI driver of this type, it would allow you to use the AHCI device for data accesses after Win XP has loaded and started up.

By the way, there may be some confusion about drivers for Win XP from a different factor. Original Win XP, as I said, lacked the ability to use HDD's over 128 GB, but that was fixed in the subsequent SP's. Some people may confuse ability to use large newer HDD's with the ability to boot from a SATA drive.

For many generations, Windows has had a second method of loading "outside" drivers so that these devices ARE available to boot from. Such drivers are loaded in a different sequence at boot time to allow their use in booting up. Common examples are drivers for SCSI or RAID devices that you boot from. AHCI devices (e.g. SATA HDD units) can be handled in the same way. The procedure MUST be done when Win XP is first Installed on the boot drive. There is a spot early in the Install process where you are asked to press the "F6" key if you wish to install extra driver(s) from a floppy disk, and you must press the key and then follow instructions to load the driver(s). After you have done that, the rest of the Install proceeds. If you do that during your Win XP Install with the appropriate AHCI device driver already loaded onto a floppy disk, you CAN create a hard drive that operates in true SATA (or AHCI) mode and is bootable. However, I strongly suspect, since your Win XP is installed on an IDE HDD unit, that his process was NOT followed in your case. Hence, if you simply clone the IDE HDD to a SATA unit and then try to boot from it in true SATA mode, it can't work because Win XP will not know how to read from the AHCI device.

Now, it happens that SATA devices and Win XP were introduced in the market at nearly the same time. Moreover, many new machines at that time did not have a floppy drive to use. So there was a big potential problem. The solution almost universally adopted was to include in BIOS Setup on the newer mobos a set of options for configuring the SATA port Mode. These often included "IDE Emulation". "SATA Mode", "AHCI Mode" (really, the same thing), and "RAID". Ideally, you could set this to AHCI Mode and use the "proper" process to add the AHCI driver to your Win XP Install. (If you planned to create a RAID array and boot from that, you would be forced to do this using RAID drivers.) But if you could not do that, you could set the SATA Port Mode to "IDE Emulation", and the mobo would limit the SATA port controllers to using only the command set of IDE devices (thus losing a few SATA features that many people did not miss), and making Win XP believe that it was really dealing only with an IDE drive, so Win XP was just fine with that.

The problem you are facing, OP, is that if a SATA HDD is prepared and used in true AHCI Mode, and then later its Port Mode is switched to IDE, Windows can't read it! There are ways to make this work that involve editing the Windows Registry settings on the HDD that has the bootable Windows installed on it, and you can look that up on the internet if you're comfortable with such operations.

My problem is, I don't know exactly where the data is on the HDD that causes this to fail. In your specific case, Option 3 means using a second machine with its SATA Port Mode set to AHCI to clone from an IDE unit to a SATA unit. At that point, the Windows Registry placed on the new drive would be exactly the same as the old one, in which the HDD characteristics are set for an IDE HDD type. Then you would move that SATA unit to your old machine with its SATA Port Mode set to IDE Emulation so that it behaves as a normal IDE unit. Now, maybe that will all work just fine. I don't know whether the mismatch somehow is caused by data in the Partition Table of the SATA HDD as written under AHCI Mode, or whether there would be no problem.

Maybe the only way to answer that is to do it and see if it works! If it does, there is no further problem. If not, your best bet would be to start over and use Option 2 to re-make the clone using the OLD machine. For that purpose, you'd have to install the cloning software you downloaded on your old machine.