New Harddisk Questions

[JasonMu]

Hi All,

My first post :)

Looking to upgrade my exisiting PC to a larger HDD, its currently an old ATA 100 30G drive (FAT 32)

Looking to move to a SATA drive @ 250 gigs.

Couple of questions :-

1) Any recommendations for SATA drives, my main board can only use the 150Mbps standard (Sata 1), I guess Sata 2 is backward compatible

2) Use windows XP, plus standalone antivirus & firewall s/w any programmes I can use to seamlessy transfer all data to boot from a new HDD without having to re-register programmes etc, I've heard of symantec ghost & acronis true image.

PC is 3.0G pentium, with 2G ram, 128 ATI grahpics card (AGP & PCI - not the newer serial PCIe variant), running windows XP, my exisiting HDD is some 5 years old & I think the system bottleneck as has no / very small cash - its slow.......

[Blind Masseur]

I don't know where you shop for computer parts, unless you live near Toronto or have a really good local computer store, I recommend NewEgg. Here is a really good deal for a WD (Western Digital) drive that is 500GB, I suggest you look for the same model (I didn't see any SATA 1 250GB drives):

http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?d...2&cid=HD.96

For hard drive manufacturers I recommend Western Digital personally. Seagate is also pretty reliable. Just don't get a Maxtor. I've never heard of Maxtor drive lasting longer than 2 years.

As for the second issue, you could manually transfer it over but that would leave all of the registry information behind. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I don't know any prgrams that do it because I've never had to.

[-pops-]

Acronis TI makes cloning hard drives very easy. You should be able to download the Acronis manual from their web site - it's quite long but you should be able to pick up the parts you need to read without absorbing the whole of it.

I can also recommend Acronis for backups of your system - all computers should have one.