I plan on buying a 250gig SATA hard drive. I am going to clone it with my current hard drive and then upgrade to Windows XP. Is there anything I need to do? I also plan to use a 80gig IDE as a slave. Is there anything special I have to do to set up my motherboard to boot from the SATA. My current specs are as follows:
ABIT AN7/AMD 2400+ Athlon(running at 2.0GHZ)
1024gigs ram 2100/266 DDR/ 128MB ATI all in wonder video/DVD +-R/RW/DL/CDRW/ audio onboard motherboard. Running Windows Me.
I plan to use Windows XP upgrade service pack 2.
Any suggestions would be appricaited.

Is your current operating system installed on an SATA drive? or is it on the 80g IDE drive?
I believe you are asking for trouble trying to clone an operating system from an IDE drive to a SATA disk.
If you want XP installed on the SATA drive then by all means do so but as a clean instal rather than attempting to clone ME then do an upgrade.
You may also need to do some reading at www.48bitlba.com regarding large drive support. Configuring the boot on a system with both SATA and IDE drives may also be a bit tricky. Check your bios options to ensure you can make your SATA the first boot device otherwise the system may default to looking for boot info on the IDE drive. You may run into drive letter assignment issues.

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.

Would it be more easier to use a 250gig IDE instead of a SATA. To avoid headaches. I would be willing to try that route instead.
I would like to upgrade from ME using the Windows XP upgrade due to all the programs I have on my current hard drive. If I have to do a clean install why does Microsoft sell this upgrade if it does not work properly.

The upgrade is for previous owners of an operating system. You can try loading "over the top" but that is a recipe for disaster. Lot's safer to do a fresh install with the XP CD and just insert the ME CD when asked to do so. Be sure and format the drive if it had ME on it.

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If I do this, how can I transfer all my files from my old hard drive to my new one.
(Will I have to do a massive back up and then transfer them/re-install)

The new hard drive may have a utility program with it, many do. If not then Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image are good.

You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

Thanks for your reply GXI Man, I have Acronis True Image.
So let me get this right, I can use this program for the new hard drive (copy over all my files to the new one) and then load windows xp. (What version of windows should I get Upgrade or full version xp.

Get upgrade and boot with that. Then during the load it will ask you for your other Windows CD to provide proof of ownership. Just insert it when asked and then the loading of XP will proceed.

If you are cloning the original drive, it will have ME and it's heartache on there as well. You don't want to contaminate your new setup with that!!! Back up your data files, and then reinstall the programs you want after XP is on there, then copy back your data files.

You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users