[Doc57]

A month or so ago I fried my motherboard and possibly my CPU. Since then I have been getting parts to build a new machine and I have one question maybe someone can help me with.

What I bought so far:

Pentium Core2 Duo, E6300, 1.86GHz processor
Cooler Master Centurion 5 CAC-TO5-UW case
Coolmax SLI CXI-500B ATX v2.01 power supply
Gigabyte GV-NX76G256D-RH GeForce 7600GS 256MB PCI-E video card w/ Silent Pipe heatsink

I had a couple different motherboards in mind but I think I'm going to wait for an Nvidia 650i SLI board which should be coming out soon. The 680i's are already out but I really don't need that much firepower at that price. I'm not a big gamer and not an overclocker....yet...lol. One reason to wait for the 650i is that it has 2 IDE connector's as well as the SATA's so I can use my ATA hard drives as well as my CD/DVD drives. Which leads me to this question:

Is it feasible to just install the Maxstor 80GB hard drive I have now (running Windows 2000, SP4) and would there be a lot of pre-install work to do? Or would it be better to get a new SATA drive (looking at a Seagate 7200.10) and reinstall Win2k? I have a lot of CAD stuff and utilities that would be a pain to reinstall. Would a Ghost image work on a new drive or possibly the Disk Wizard that Seagate has which transfers the old drive contents to the new drive?

Anyone see any potential problems with either direction I go? I'd like to go the easiest possible route but not if it's going to screw things up for me. Thanks in advance.

 

[dai]

i think you will find that this is not good enough to run your system
Coolmax SLI CXI-500B ATX v2.01 power supply
http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?t=107466
when setting up the new system it is always the best option to do a clean install at a minimum you will have to do a repair installation even if you ghost the drive across

 

[Doc57]

Thanks dai. I thought I'd checked it out pretty good but after looking at your article I think I'll go with either the Fortron or one of the OCZ units. I figured a clean install would be best but I'm sure not looking forward to loading everything back in. Guess that's the price we have to pay to rebuild, huh?..lol

 

[dai]

good luck with the build

 

[Doc57]

Been looking around again (I really gotta stop doing that..lol) and I was wondering what you all thought of this idea.

I was thinking about getting a new SATA drive soon anyway so I thought about just getting Windows XP or maybe even Vista to install on it and then making a virtual drive for my old Windows 2000 installation. Good idea or bad?

Also, if I would get XP on a new SATA drive, would it be possible to make an ISO out of my current system and use the old PATA drive as a virtual disk? That way I could have both OS's without having to reboot.

Am I making any sense or don't I know what I'm talking about???

 

[Kalim]

PATA's are UDMA 6 at the fastest @ 133MB/s transfer and SATA 1 is @ 150/MB/s while SATA 2 is @ 300MB/s. Much difference.
You don't need the latest mobo's to have both SATA and IDE connectors.

One of the PC's I have is running a MSI 6743 which has 2 SATA and 2 IDE connectors. The mobo's released when SATA drives were first hitting the markets will all mostly have both options available.

The SATA as the new OS and the PATA as the old OS but virtual??

Use this for ease: XXClone

 

[crazijoe]

I was thinking about getting a new SATA drive soon anyway so I thought about just getting Windows XP or maybe even Vista to install on it and then making a virtual drive for my old Windows 2000 installation. Good idea or bad?

Totally plausible. You could even network the 2 environments. That way the Win2K VM can pull shares off the WinXP. We do this in our business world. We actually have a single server with 5 virtual Win2K3 servers and 2 virtual XP boxes on it. All networked together.
Be aware that the virtual machine will use physical resources of you host machine. Meaning more memory and hardrive space.