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Old 16-12-2013, 03:52 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RB View Post
Would this work on old IDE and SATA drives running XP?
The OS on the disk shouldn't matter - it'll be faithfully copied - it's a byte-by-byte copy and it doesn't matter what's in the byte.

As to booting off a new SATA drive after cloning an old IDE drive .... well, I've never tested it.

The changes from IDE to SATA were designed to be fairly transparent to the user and I can't presently think of a reason why it wouldn't work.

If you're thinking of transplanting to a new machine (new motherboard) then you will definitely have problems, and I doubt the machine would get far in the boot process due to wrong drivers and wrong absolute addresses.

For a cloned HDD put back in the same machine, it's worth a try.

Keep in mind that cloning does not increase the size of partitions/volumes. For example, if you clone a 100GB drive to a 1000GB drive, you will still only use 100GB! You will have to add either a new volume to use the remaining 900GB (from within your OS) or expand the exisiting partitions/volumes to use more space - that can be risky and a fair percentage of partition/volume resizes have been known to fail.
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