Yes, but ...

Post #355,070 by Another Scott 3/6/12 3:14:33 PM Reply	Yes, but ... Yes adapters exist - http://www.newegg.co...ue#scrollFullInfo - but read the comments. Is there room in the PC for a PCI card with the proper interface? E.g. http://www.newegg.co...m=N82E16815280001 Read the reviews, too. If there isn't room for a new card and you don't want the internal interface adapter, there's always an external USB2 drive (assuming your PC has USB2 ports). Amazon still has 320 GB and 500 GB IDE drives - http://www.amazon.co...ds=ide+hard+drive HTH a little. Good luck. Cheers, Scott.
Post #355,085 by lincoln 3/6/12 9:17:22 PM Reply	have room for the adapter card the motherboard has 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI slots, so a PCI card would be the way to go. The one you linked to has feedback comments saying that you can't boot from it, so that rules it out since this is the drive that has the OS on it. Haven't read if you can boot a PC from an external USB hard drive, and I'm assuming that some programs will be flaky running from an external drive too. Newegg, TigerDirect, Frys, Best But and Micro Center didn't have EIDE drives as big as the 300 Gig I have now, and past experience has shown that most cloning programs require the new target drive to be at least the same size as the original drive, if not bigger. Appreciate the help. "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow
Post #355,087 by scoenye 3/6/12 10:51:03 PM Reply	Why not keep the current drive as the boot drive? Then you don't need to find a bootable PCI adapter and all you need is a plain copy of the other partitions to the new drive. Moving the same drive letters to the new partitions should keep things working. Once the three partitions are moved you can grow the existing C: to get you more room to maneuver. PS: take a look at the Windows Update download directory. If you have automatic updates going, there could be a few gigs hiding in there. The files are safe to delete.
Post #355,090 by crazy 3/7/12 7:20:32 AM Reply	Strongly suggest use as NON boot I've got a bunch of high-end but old, just before SATA came out machines. I've learned (via painful sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, which f'ing slot was it in when it worked?, fuck, it mattered?) process that I keep the original boot / install disk whenever possible. I tried to treat it like SCSI, but SCSI controllers have far more intelligence (at least mine did) and SATA did not, so where the SCSI worked the SATA failed. I've even had the boot mode geometry settings get flipped during the process (since the older BIOSes could only get to the tiny 1st partition, and then certain compat modes triggered), which then caused the next step to scribble on the wrong area of the disk. On the other hand, treated as a secondary with the OS fully booted before any attempt at access, and they make for fast big storage on the older boxes.
Post #355,112 by lincoln 3/7/12 2:41:22 PM Reply	Should've said the box has 2 drives in it earlier bought two 300 Gig drives several years ago when I needed to expand my storage real estate. The second physical drive is also partitioned (into 3 letter sections) and that is also getting real tight on free space. Looks like I'll have to get an external drive, move data files to it, kill a partition on the primary physical drive and then let the current C: expand into it. Not my ideal solution since I don't like having one plugged into the power strip and taking up one of the 2 free USB ports in the PC's backside. "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to IWETHEY!