hdd ide to sata; which way to go

[tjones136 at cox.net]

---- betty <nicepenguin at webcanine.com> 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.
> 
> -- 
> betty i.
> www.webcanine.com
> information for people 
> who care for dogs.
> 
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I actually had to something similar a while back to replace a hard drive.  I used dd to copy the data from the first disk to the second disk like so:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024k

I then removed what had been sda (it was in the process of dying) and moved the other drive so that it became sda.  Of course, you're free to put the disks wherever you want, just don't get the source and destination confused.

I then booted off a live CD and used it to reinstall grub using the instructions presented here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 as a guide.

All told it took me about 30 minutes to clone, reinstall grub, and get back up and running on the new disk.

TJ