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I'm so grateful for these forums and depend heavily upon them. This is one answer that didn't come up in my search, however. I'm working for a nice agency in helping to attach some new computers to their long-standing network. The new Dell Dimension 8400's weren't my choice, but I must cope.

They are SATA driven with XP Home. None-the-less, all their old IDE Win2000 drives have the proper settings and personal data that employees expect to find and access when I'm finished. My goal is to format the SATAs, clone the Win2000 to them and then format the IDEs for additional storage.

Will I encounter a problem cloning from IDE to SATA?
Is there a recommended software for this? (I don't have or use Norton Ghost.)
Is it openly available on the Internet?

Thanks for help...

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Dani AI

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Cloning an IDE Windows 2000 image onto a new SATA machine is doable, but plan for the storage-driver and hardware differences up front. is right to warn about registry/driver mismatches; those are the usual cause of a non-booting clone. Treat the clone as an image + data migration project, not just a file copy.

The immediate technical risk is an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (Stop 0x7B) after the restore when the OS doesn't have a driver for the target machine's storage controller. Microsoft documents that symptom and shows the usual fix paths (enable the correct driver or keep the controller in compatibility/IDE mode while you install drivers). Also use Microsoft's Sysprep to generalize a Windows 2000/XP image before wide deployment — Sysprep removes hardware-specific settings and reduces problems when cloning to different hardware. (support.microsoft.com)

Tool choices depend on skill and budget. Clonezilla (free) is a reliable live-CD imaging tool for disk-to-image or disk-to-disk cloning. Commercial packages such as Macrium Reflect (with ReDeploy) or Acronis (Universal Restore) include facilities to adapt a restored Windows system to dissimilar hardware, which can save a lot of troubleshooting time in bulk deployments. If you prefer free, combine Sysprep + Clonezilla and be prepared to handle driver injection manually; if you want convenience and rollback, consider Macrium or Acronis. (clonezilla.org)

Quick checklist to follow

  1. Image the source disk and separately copy user profiles (Documents, Desktop, PSTs) to an external location.
  2. Run Sysprep on the source OS to generalize the install.
  3. Create a rescue/boot media and image the drive (or clone disk-to-disk) to the new SATA drive.
  4. If the restored machine won’t boot, set SATA to IDE/Compatibility in BIOS to get a first boot, install the correct chipset/SATA drivers, then (optionally) switch to AHCI.
  5. Test one machine thoroughly before doing them all; if problems persist, do a clean OS install and migrate data.

This approach minimizes downtime and preserves profiles while keeping a clean recovery path if cloning to dissimilar hardware runs into driver/activation issues.

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Personally, I would not do this. Especially when upgrading to a newer computer, cloning old drives can be much more trouble than their worth - think of motherboard drivers and configurations that installed themselves during Windows installation, etc., not to mention all of the other device drivers. I just don't recommend it because it can get pretty messy, especially in the good ole registry.

Member Avatar for BryanA917

Usually, I wouldn't even attempt this - to keep the personal files entact, I went to the Dell website to download drivers for all available catagories. I'm happy to say that the Intel chipset and main devices were provided for with drivers for 2000 and XP.

When my client's employees saw their desktops again with pictures of doggies and family, they were happy and the client was then happy. So I'm happy to report that the drivers have already been a success; that leads me to the question above... The process is all legit as far as Microsoft is concerned as well since each user will have their original version of Windows only once on one harddrive in the end.

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