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I want to replace my old IDE hard drive. I made literal copy of it on the new drive. The problem is the new drive is SATA and connects differently to the motherboard. Of course it doesn’t boot because somewhere probably there is a record it must be IDE drive connected to the IDE connector of the motherboard to boot.
Is there a way to override that, to make it bootable as SATA without destroying the already copied windows and programs on it?
Possible scenarios I can think of are:
1. Modify some init windows file on the drive that will tell it it’s a SATA drive. I have Vista 64 bit if that matters.
2. Maybe I need to modify the MBR?
3. Put installation Windows DVD in and ‘repair’ the installation, hopefully it won’t delete the programs and settings?
Will any of those work or I need to freshly reinstall everything on the new drive?
When you say it doesn’t boot, does Windows start to boot or does nothing happen at all?
Some motherboards will need Windows to have SATA drivers loaded to boot, you would normally do this by pressing F6 when you install Windows. You may have to reinstall.
If you boot from the Vista install disk you could try repairing the MBR, it is possible when you cloned the drive it wasn’t copied. See the Microsoft Support page on how to do this.
You could also try and run an upgrade from the install disk which would hopefully keep your files and programs.
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