Member Avatar for Jshammy

I have a new computer arriving soon with a 640GB SATA hard drive running Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, I want to move my other 250GB SATA hard drive running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit from my dead computer to the new computer to transfer data.

My question is after I install the old hard drive to the new computer, how do I set the old drive as the slave and the new one as the master? If I turn on the computer and go straight to windows, would it automatically set each of them to master and slave, and would it cause problems if I don't boot from one of them and just let it choose by itself? Would both drive appear on My Computer so that I can drag and transfer files?

Thanks all

  • 2 Contributors
  • 1 Reply
  • 140 Views
  • 1 Month Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Phil Friel
Member Avatar for Phil Friel

I'd be very interested in any response to this question. I've just bought 2 Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB hard drives (still waiting for them to arrive), and will be installing both in my computer which currently has a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA-300 drive.

I'd like to keep all three hard drives in the computer, but copy everything (including Windows Vista plus all settings) to one of the new Spinpoints. Everything will later be erased from the older 320GB drive once I've made sure that the system is booting and working satisfactorily from the new Spinpoint drive.

What would be the easiest way to do this? Can it be done directly from within Vista, or will I require some kind of disk cloning software? (Any recommendations?)

I'm aware that SATA drives don't use master/slave settings like the old IDE drives do, so what happens when I reboot my computer for the first time with the exact same OS/software/settings on two separate drives. Which drive will boot, and is there some way of controlling the boot sequence?

Slightly confused at the moment, as I've never done this before... :(

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.