Xp ide to sata trueimage clone boot

What OS? If it's Win XP in any version, you have to adjust how the SATA HDD is treated by the BIOS. Maybe you've done this, maybe not.

Win XP does not understand SATA units unless you install a SATA or AHCI device driver. In BIOS Setup, many people (quite reasonably) will install a new SATA HDD and set its SATA Port Mode option to Native SATA or AHCI, because it's a SATA drive! In this mode if you are booting from an IDE unit and then using a SATA drive as a second unit, you can simply install the driver in Win XP after it's running and all will work. If you're lucky when you first install the SATA device, the Win XP you boot from the old IDE drive may just detect the new device and install the required driver without your notice. BUT you will not be able to BOOT from this drive.

If you need to install your OS and boot from a SATA HDD with Win XP there are two options. One is to Install the OS from the CD and use the F10 option to load the AHCI driver into the OS as part of it. (The loading has to be done from a floppy diskette!) In your case you cloned from an IDE HDD to the new SATA unit, and I am sure your original OS installation did NOT have this AHCI driver installed that way, so the clone copy does not, either.

The other option for installing XP on a SATA HDD as the boot unit is to use the special BIOS trick many makers have included. Go into BIOS Setup and check where you Enabled the SATA port for this new HDD. Very close by is a setting for SATA Port Mode. Set this option to IDE (or PATA) Emulation of something like that. When you do this, the BIOS fools Win XP into thinking this is just a simple IDE drive it DOES have its own driver for and it can use the SATA disk unit for anything, including booting! By doing this you do loose a few new features of SATA units (really, AHCI devices), but you may not need them, anyway.

Using Acronis TruImage, you can either clone or restore with resize to use the additional space. My preference is to create a backup image and then restore with resize. Here is the link for more info>
http://kb.acronis.com/content/2770

If your C: drive is on a Western Digital,
WD also has a customized version of Acronis here:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=...

It won't work without at least one WD installed in your system, however.

This software has worked perfectly for us, several times:
it handles the MFT properly. We prefer the "As Is" option;
then, we expand the secondary (data) partition
using Partition Wizard:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/


All of our C: partitions are 20-30 GB, for easy management
of drive image files, and the remainder is formatted as a
dedicated data partition.


p.s. There is a way for "force" a switch from IDE to AHCI modes:
first, you must use Device Manager to force a change in the
device driver (this takes some knowledge / not for noobs).

Then, boot into the BIOS and change the BIOS setting to AHCI.
When XP loads this time, it should find the AHCI driver and
load it properly.

You do want AHCI enabled, if possible, because it helps with performance
e.g. Native Command Queuing is not supported in native IDE mode.


MRFS