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Hey all, I have an interesting challenge for anyone up for it... I just bought a WD Caviar SATA (II) 250 GB HD as an upgrade from my 80 GB WD Caviar EIDE HD. I have Windows XP SP2 installed on the 80 GB, and I don't want to have to reinstall the OS on the SATA drive. Instead, I want to do a bit for bit copy from the 80GB EIDE to the 250GB SATA. However, to complicate the matters, I have 2 partitions on the 80 GB. I want to merge these partitions, and then copy the single partition to the SATA (while keeping the SATA as a single partition). Therefore, the copy will have to only append the data to the single 250GB partition on the SATA drive. The motherboard is an Asus A7n8X deluxe capable of running an EIDE drive and SATA (I) drive simultaneously. I have a clean, working, bootable version of Windows XP SP2 on the EIDE HD. Finally, I don't want to have to pay for any software to do this (i.e. I only want to use freeware software). Therefore, my questions are as follows:

1. What software to use to merge the partition and copy the data.
2. How to copy the data in such a way that the SATA drive stays as one partition and the boot sector integrity is maintained.
3. How to change the boot order (and possibly edit the boot sector if needed) so that the PC loads Windows XP on the SATA drive.
4. Any other forseen problems that you see that I missed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Clayton

Welcome to PCHF, for 1 & 2 Norton Ghost will accomplish this for you: http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/ - you won't need to merge the partition if you don't want to...but you could use Partition Magic before hand to achieve this (the free version will do in this instance). You will lose the data on the SATA drive.

3) You can set this once you have "Ghosted" the drive. The
4) Nope, not really...unless I have mis-understood your requirements.

I decided to go with a reformat and reinstallation of Windows XP instead of a bit for bit copy... Thanks for your help and replies though.... -Clayton

Ok, no problem, thanks for letting us know