I'll be honest here: I had two major problems when switching out my hard drive. First, I had to track down all the software I had installed. You're probably thinking "Why didn't you just migrate it?" Simple. My old drive was congested, full of bugs, and programs kept crashing on it. All the maintenance I could do eventually became worthless, necessitating this project. If I simply migrated from one disk to another, I'd have the same old problems on a new disk.
Speaking of the new disk, that was where I had my second problem. It seems the hard drive I bought was a SATA II drive. Now, in case you're not computer-savvy, there are three types of hard drives:
- IDE (also called PATA, Ultra ATA, and ATA) - This is the standard which has been around since the 1980s. The connection looks like a wide grey ribbon, with a red stripe on one side.
- SATA (also called SATA I)- Introduced a few years ago, SATA drives run faster and read data at a slightly higher rata than IDE. The connection is a relatively thin red cord.
- SATA II - This looks, acts and smells like a SATA, only it's supposed to read twice as fast.
Anyway, long story short, no matter what I tried, my PC would not install this SATA II drive as the new boot disk. Apparently, the copy of Windows XP I have doesn't like SATA II (which is strange, because XP is supposed to be adaptable to newly-installed stuff). So, I took my PC over to Tom (He and my mother have been an item for... a while, and he's more tech-savvy than I am), and he had the same problem!
So, we re-packaged the SATA II (which I will return), and Tom gave me a 200GB SATA I, which works fine! By the way, the SATA II drive was only 160GB. Thanks, Tom! You are a god!
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