Hey all,

I'm new to the site and am having a problem I was hoping someone could help me with. I just got a new system and it came with a via mobo and a maxtor hdd with the regular old ide ribbon cable style. I bought a new samsung sata hdd, which I would like to get installed and then ghost the system onto the new drive and use the maxtor in an older machine, anywho, I installed the drive, but the boot screen gives and error reguarding the raid array and that it is a scsi drive. I'm totally unfamiliar with sata, so I need some baby steps to take here. If I go into cmos, it does not recognize the drive in the ide listings, but in another area of cmos used to set drive priority, the drive is there. When I load into xp, the drivers are installed and device manager tells me the drive is working properly, but there is no drive letter for it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You'll have to disable RAID in you BIOS.
Also, if the drive is brand-new, it has no partitions.
Via disk managment you can create a partition.
That partition needs formating. Via disk managment or explorer.
But the problem is the disk change.
You'll need to install windows all over again. The core system files are unaccessible normal way and only accessible via repair mode console. It is too much of the work (manual copy file by file) and installing xp again is easier and simpler, but one problem there is possible: You said that you're not familiar with sata. Neither is XP. You will need (old XP version) a floppy disk (and a floppy drive) with so-called F6 drivers for the sata controller. That you can get and make with mobo bootable CD. I had quet a hassle with my asus a8n sli mobo and xp installation.

Maybe you can bypass the f6 drivers if you format the HD now and then switch them.

Thanks for the info. I ran disk mgt and the drive is showing up in my computer now. Problem w/ reinstalling windows is that it is a cracker box system and it only came with a recovery disk, not an xp cd, so I don't think the recovery disk has enough on it to do a clean install. Are there any disk cloning programs you know of that would get everything from the hdd transfered to the new one or no?

Problem is that windows need a 8 mb hidden partition that is showing as unpartitione space, and that is not covered with any disk cloning tools. Disk cloninng or imaging are not "disk" but "partition" cloning or imaging tools. Anything outside a partition is not cloned nor imaged. So you'll have to get a Windows installation disk to install windows, and later use the recovery disk to get the "legal" copy of windows on your system.

wouldnt the recovery CD itself have the OS in it?

Could you walk me through this process, as I have the same MOBO and am experiencing the same problem.