Upgrade from IDE HDD to SATA HDD?

[CBaca]

I have tried researching this on the internet and in these forums and I am still confused. I have a HP m495c Media Center pc. Unfortunately I don't have the money to build a new system but, I can afford to buy a new hard drive. The motherboard does has 2 SATA 1.5 connectors. The motherboard model is an ASUS P4SD-LA. The HP name for the MB is Oxford-UL6E.

What I wanted to do is buy a 500GB SATA drive and clone my old 200BG IDE drive to it. I would then reformat the old IDE drive and use it as an external hard drive. Is it possible to replace the IDE drive with the SATA drive and what would I have to do in the BIOS to boot from the SATA drive? I was planning on using ACRONIS Migrate Easy to do the cloning. HP did not include an XP OS disk with the computer, so I don't have any way to do a clean install.

I also have a question about cloning, assuming that I can do the above. Would I need to deactivate my copy of CS3 before cloning and then reactivate it on the new drive? Also have the same question about Office 2003.

 

[CBaca]

bump

 

[treefrog07]

Acronis should be able to clone the old drive to the new drive. Cloning is copying the entire source drive to the target drive. You would not have to re-activate any of your programs. After successful cloning of the HDD, you would likely have to enter the BIOS (tapping the F1 or F2 key at start-up) to change the boot drive from the old HDD to the new HDD. You would do this after you performed the cloning to verify that it was successful. Then you could disconnect the old HDD and re-boot to be sure the your computer boots from the new HDD. Then re-connect the old HDD, format it, remove it from the computer, and install it in the external enclosure.

 

[ItzMe]

I tried replacing my IDE with a SATA disk. Until now, i did not succeed!
The story: I made an succesful image backup (using Norton Ghost).
After replacing the backup on the SATA Disc i got a 'b0 error...'; No boot disk available.
Then i noticed i had to set the disk 'Active' by FDISK. I had this done by using an old ME Boot floppy.
After this Windows XP seemed starting to boot, but stucks just before the user signon appears.
I tried several repair actions, like FIXMBR from the 'R'ecovery Console (XP CD boot).
I realized SATA disk needs iastore.sys (Intel) at Windows XP installation (F6), which has not be done ofcourse at the IDE HDD. So, my guess is the problem is somewhere there. Anyone got ideas?

 

[Rusting In Peace]

If I was you I'd just reinstall a new OS on the SATA drive. Backup what data you need from the IDE drive somewhere else and disconnect the drive for now. Cloning disks can be a massive pain in the neck. It might seem quicker to clone but it will take you as long to just reinstall things.

There is no need to deactivate any software. You've paid for the license key; just install the software on your new OS and apply the keys.