Author Topic: PATA to SATA boot drive replacement? (Read 215 times)

eagl · « **on:** February 18, 2007, 01:50:28 AM »

After reading this article:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

I did some checking into the SMART data on the 2 hard drives in my computer and I found that my main drive has a ton of reallocated errors and a significant raw read error rate. According to the google report, there is up to a 60% chance that it'll fail within 8 months of the first errors. I have no idea when the errors started occurring, so basically I figure I need to replace that drive asap.

Here's the thing - it's my boot drive, and it's PATA. The drive I'll probably replace it with is either a western digital SE16 500 gig SATA, or a samsung spinpoint T 500 gig SATA, based on price, noise, and heat (as documented at http://www.silentpcreview.com).

So... Am I going to have any problems going from a boot PATA setup to a boot SATA setup? I have norton ghost and planned on just ghosting the whole drive over and changing boot priority, but will that work automatically? Right now, I don't even have the SATA ports activated in BIOS, so will this just work ok or will I need to do funky things with drivers?

Thanks in advance!

(this also reinforces my desire to set up a RAID fileserver, but it takes about $150 out of my budget to do so...)

Auger · « **Reply #1 on:** February 18, 2007, 02:05:18 AM »

You'll want to put the SATA drive in and make sure it is seen by the OS, and that you can read and write to it. That will prove that it should work. And you will need to install the SATA drivers for your motherboard.

Booting from it and having it show up as the C: drive will depend on your motherboard BIOS. If it allows the SATA ports to take precedence over the PATA ports (i.e. become disk 0x80) then it will work fine.

eagl · « **Reply #2 on:** February 18, 2007, 04:28:53 AM »

Thanks. I think I'll start by enabling the SATA controller, and seeing if winXP detects the controller without any drives on it. Then I'll install the drive as a secondary drive so I can do the ghost thing to it, and make sure it's partitioned right after the ghosting. Then I'll change the boot priority to see if I can get it to boot from it. Then I'll remove the potentially failing PATA drive and put it into my test platform that I use to try out risky or otherwise strange stuff.

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #3 on:** February 18, 2007, 06:13:33 AM »

Just a warning: I couldnt get Norton Ghost 10 to work on my sata laptop at all. To top it off, it left permanent damage to registry during uninstall. All Symantec products seem to be utter crap these days.