From ATA to SATA

I've been getting short on disk space on my main dev machine lately. Something that hadn't happened for at least 7 or 8 years. With a difference: Disk space is so cheap nowadays that you don't even think of trying to get rid of unused stuff. You simply buy a bigger hard disk.

Hence I decided to replace my 80GB ATA drive by a brand new 250GB SATA drive.

Here's what I learned. You may find it useful.

1. When you buy a S-ATA drive, of course you know you need a S-ATA data cable (and a mobo that supports S-ATA !). But did you know you also need S-ATA power cable ? I didn't. And if, like me, you live in the middle of nowhere, you won't find it funny to have to drive back to your favorite computer shop for a stupid 2.5 € power cable adaptor :-(

People tell me that such HDDs usually have a built-in molex adaptor but mine doesn't.

2. If you use Ghost to copy the contents of your old drive to the new one, you don't need to boot on the CD but you need to activate your copy to enable the Copy Drive function.

3. When using Ghost, make sure to select the Copy MBR option. Ghost tells you that you should use the option carefully. They are probably right but I'll tell you : If you want to make a plain vanilla copy of your drive, you need the option. I didn't click it. Then when I tried to boot on the damn disk, it started to boot but kept hanging again and again more or less when arriving at the logon prompt. Go figure... And try to realize that the Copy MBR option is what you're missing :-(

4. You're using AVG ? The Resident Shield module may fail to restart. Just re-run the installation program and choose Repair Installation.

You guess it: The transition was harder than expected because of a couple of stupid glitches (I don't even want to speak about the misleading BIOS messages that made me wonder why the SATA drive was not recognized even though it was). But the good news is that it's probable going to be another 10 years before I write about HDD space problems again !