Moving XP from IDE to SATA without install CD's

jeggi

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Nov 17, 2010
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Hey everyone,
I'm currently working on building my first computer :D . I've got all my parts ordered and on the way; I'm replacing the Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and adding a graphics card. I'm trying to save some money by avoiding purchasing Windows 7 because my windows XP is working fine. The problem is that my OS is on my old hard drive, which is an IDE drive. My new Hard drive is a SATA drive. Initially my thought was to connect my new hard drive to my old motherboard (since it can actually run windows) and clone it over. The problem is my old motherboard doesn't have a SATA connection. My new mother board has an IDE and SATA connection but I'm not sure how I can copy the info over. If I try and run my old Hard Drive with XP already on it I'm assuming its not going to start up. That wouldn't be an issue if I had the install CD's but I don't. Does anyone have any idea how I can solve my problem? Here's how I'm assuming I need to work this out.

1) I need to figure out a way to get XP up and running on my new motherboard with my old IDE Hard Drive without the install CD's

2) After that I think I could figure out how to get a cloning program running and copy it over, then switch the startup drive in my BIOS

Any help I could get would be great! Thanks! This community Rocks!
 
Plug in your IDE drive(s)

Do a "Repair" on Windows before you even try to make windows run. The HAL is going to be bad until the repair is completed.

Run Windows, "new hardware" will be discovered, which will be everything in your box, right down to the keyboard and mouse, be patient, it all must be adopted by windows. It will also find your SATA controller. Here, you will need the driver disk or download the driver from internet.

When you think you have it made, you'll need to install the chipset drivers for the new board, as well as sound and video cards, network adapters, everything, but at least XP itself will be running. All XP updates need to be re-loaded, Net Framework, DirectX, but not programs.

Do all this on the IDE drive. When done, you can clone the IDE drive to the new SATA drive and since you put the drivers in Windows earlier, it should start up and run like it was always there.

It's a project. Good luck.

Edit: Oops! I forgot you don't have the XP CD. Your odds of a successful migration just went to about 1 in 40x10E99. Sorry, borrow one from somebody, hope it is the same version. You must be able to do the repair, but then again, you might just get lucky.

Your cloning program is a CD ISO image that must be burned to CD with a burning program that can do an ISO image. Most can, no worries there. Get it from me
HERE.