Very Quick (!) SATA question

[pert_of_jb]

Hi All,
I have just purchased a faster / bigger Samsung HDD for my desktop PC. I have in my mind that the "old" drive is still useful as a backup drive. I therefore want to change the new drive to the OS drive, and use the old drive for junk...
They are both SATA drives, so I don't need to do anything with Jumpers (right?!). However I'm puzzled as to how I go about making the new drive the bootable one...
I have used cloning software (Acronis - Migrate Easy 7.0) and I can now see on the new drive the cloning has been successful.

Should I format the old HDD to remove the old OS, and then the new drive will sort itself out? or is there something more I need to do?!

Many Thanks in advance!

 

[Guest]

My solution was

1)unplug old drive, plug in new drive
2)reboot and load OS from new drive
3)shutdown and plug in old drive
4)reboot

the system 'automagically' carried on booting from the new drive, though I would be interested in hearing if there is a right way of doing this

 

[Paperdoc]

Your BIOS has a place where you specifically set which device to boot from. Some people choose a sequence to run through. So my practice in this situation is:
1. Install new drive, run Acronis (or whatever tool) to make the clone. - DONE by you.
2. Shut down, disconnect data and power connections to old drive. If necessary, physically move drives to final drive bay locations. Connect new drive's data cable to the mobo port that used to be for the old drive. Close up and reboot. this way the BIOS is still booting from the same port it was using before and there should be no confusion.
3. Run this way for a while to prove to yourself it's all perfect. If there are any serious glitches, you still have an untouched perfect backup, up to the point of transfer.
4. When happy, re-install and connect old drive, then boot up. Ensure it is showing in Windows My Computer.
5. Use Disk Manager or other third-party tools to delete all Partitions on old drive. This wipes it completely clean and you cannot recover! (Well, it only removes all tracking info for the data stored there - the data still exists, but is REALLY hard to recover.)
6. Create new Partition(s) and format them all. Assuming this will not be used for booting, make the Partitions all non-bootable. When format is done, unless you know you need FAT32, choose to install the NTFS file system. If you don't agree with drive letters assigned as names to the drives and Partitions, change them.
7. Reboot so Windows can record all this in its Registry, then check My Computer to verify it is set up the way you wanted.