betyouaint

Okay... after several years of living in the dark ages it is time to upgrade my drives from ATA to SATA.

I am currently running an ASUS A8V Deluxe with AMD 4400+ (Dual Athlon 64) and 1 GB RAM. My current drives include a 120 Maxtor and 250 Seagate connected via IDE. Both drives have their own version of XP Pro in a dual boot role.

I have just ordered a pair of Seagate 500GB SATA II drives to upgrade the capacity and speed of my system. I am aware that the motherboard only supports SATA I, but am relying on backwards compatability to help me out. At present, I have no intention of running any kind of RAID configuration as I've never had real reason to.

So, here come the questions....

1. Can I simply clone my current drives directly to the SATA drives...?

2. Can I have both the IDE and the SATA drives connected to the motherboard at the same time (to facilitate cloning)...?

3. How will my multi-boot arrangement work afterwards...?

4. Any other issues I should consider...?

Cheers O mighty gurus...