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Solve : Hard drive conection help.?

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Okay, here's my situation my parents have a virus filled PC with two SATA HDDs (one OS & one storage). The system BARELY works anymore, so i'm gonna back the files up for them & do a reinstall of Ubuntu Linux instead of the XP they were running.

I have IDE hard drives with Windows 2000 & Ubuntu on them. I WANT to put 1 in the PC and use it as the OS drive while I'm backing their data. To do this I need both the SATA drives to not boot cause i want to boot from the IDE drive. It has two IDE DVD drives hooked up and looks like one extra slot for an IDE ribbon cable.

Can someone help me, and tell me what I need to do the accomplish booting from my IDE HDD?If im following you right? Dont have the drives connected, only the one you want to use at the moment.no, i need the 2 SATA drives conected as well the IDE one.
I need to copy data from one SATA drive to the other.Just thought of 2 more options:
1. use the Ubuntu live CD as my OS and copy all the files from one drive to the other
2. create a partition on the OS drive and install a temporary OS there.

What do you think?Columbis took a chanceQuote from: xavier on July 21, 2009, 05:12:04 PM

Columbis took a chance
So are you meaning I should mess around with the cables and stuff til I get a working configuration? Are there any risks associated with doing this?Yes you want a working config. The only problem you might have is a drive wont be recognised if not set up rightSet the ide in bios first bootIf i were you i would first determine which HDD is going to be the main boot drive...
I would then REMOVE that drive and hook it up as a slave drive to back up all the data using This Guide....

Following that i would remove all other HDD's and format and re-install whatever OS you want on the main drive...
Once checking that all drivers have been properly installed and everything is in working order i would then re-introduce all the other HDD's one at a time with a few re-boots at each one...If you would just use Ubuntu to backup the data, you could just use the LiveCD to boot up your PC to do the backup. If you would totally use Ubuntu as its OS, then it would be wise following Patio's instructions.Quote from: patio on July 21, 2009, 08:13:14 PM
If i were you i would first determine which HDD is going to be the main boot drive...
I would then remove that drive and hook it up as a slave drive to back up all the data using This Guide....
Right now my main HDD needs to be the IDE one with the 250 GB & 500 GB SATA drives as slaves. When I'm done backing stuff up I want to CHANGE to configuration back to what it is now.don't most PCs have a boot option between IDE/SATA?Yep.


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