Wanted to buy a HDD as present for my son. He now has a 40GB IDE HDD. Two questions: 1) In general, can there be problems using primary / secondary HDDs where one is IDE and one is SATA? His MB has connections for both IDE and 2 SATA . Is it best to avoid mixing the types, or is it commonly done? 2) What is the easiest way transfer the contents of old, smaller HDD to the new one, assuming he doesn't reinstall everything? I have Ghost, but he doesn't. I guess we could temporarily install Ghost on his machine and clone the old to new HDD. Are there easier ways for him? However, he only has one partition on old HDD. I think he probably should partition the new 250 GB HDD before doing any cloning / transferring / installing. Opinions or suggestions on easiest route? Thanks!

1. Yes, you can use both types of drives. I have not experienced any problems while doing so, but you might want to search the forum to see if there are any horror stories out there. 2. Ghost works well and I think you can make the partition size when you do the image. Be sure to perform a dskchk on the old drive before cloning.

Thanks Grok, I assume when you say "make the partition size when you do the image", that you mean when you start cloning the saved image file to the new HDD? Of course, if he wants to go a little higher tech than having one giant 250 GB partition, he'll wind up just having to do a fresh install of OS & all apps. BTW - is there a "Grok" species of lobster?

Lots of people have had problems when trying to clone from an IDE drive to SATA. Chief problem being that the current XP instal does not contain SATA drivers in the bootfiles. Suggest your son keeps his current drive/operating system as-is and add the SATA drive as storage. If he wants to use the SATA as primary boot drive then set it as first boot device in bios and do a clean instal. Will have to press F6 when prompted to instal SATA drivers during the initial setup sequence. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Thanks everyone, for input.