First, I'd definitely recommend going with a new SATA drive on the new machine. You'll find everything just works better and the added reliability of a newer drive makes for a lot less stress (although regular and frequent backups are definitely the best peace-of-mind tool).
For the data transfer there are 3 simple options:
1) If you have, or can borrow, a large enough USB drive (flash or HDD), I'd copy everything (I prefer rsync, but dd is a good choice too) to the USB drive, then copy from that to the new computer.
2) Temporarily install the old drive in the new machine on the ATA (CDROM) interface (if the new machine has an old-style ATA interface for the CD drives), and copy the data from one drive to the other (definitely use rsync here).
3) Connect the two machines to an ethernet router/hub and use rsync to transfer the files over the ethernet connection.
However you end up doing the transfer, I'd definitely recommend retaining a separate backup of all of your personal data (pictures, documents, music, videos, etc...) as part of the process, if at all possible.
betty wrote:
> This is the last forum for my research on this project, everyone's
> advice here has always been most helpful. Although i haven't needed too
> much advice lately (since linux is sooo stable !)
>
> I have an old pentium 3 with ide hdd that i have been using for many
> years. It is a little slow (to say the least) especially running
> multiple apps.
> I was just given a dell optiplex mini form factor w/pentium 4 and sata
> drive connectors. (*no hdd*).
> It looks like there are two options here;
>
> i can get ide to sata connectors and use my old drive so nothing really
> changes and it seems easy, however the hdd is old (maybe 10 years) so i
> risk eventual hardware failure.
> or
> i can get a sata drive and copy everything to it. seems best way to me.
> not that much more expensive. will last longer etc.
>
> question: if i go for option two, is there a way to copy (like mirror)
> my old drive stuff to the new one so it works and looks the same to
> me???, if so how do i do that? (the old computer does not have a working
> cdrw)
> or do i need to do a new install and copy my files over :(
>
> thanks for your patience and help in advance.
>
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