Hi, I have just purchased a new 250 gig hardrive to replace my main drive. I am a bit worried about connecting it as with previous drives have just connected to a parallel cable already in my pc and to a spare power cable. Can anyone advise me is it going to be easy to install cable wise and how easy its going to be to copy my operating system from my old hard drive to the new one. Any advice would be gratefull received.
Well, you'll want to make sure that you have SATA ports on your motherboard. If not, you'll need to purchase a SATA controller card. Installation isn't any harder than an IDE drive, but the connectors are different for the power and data.
Welcome to hardwareforums! The drives are easy'er to install than ATA drives, and there is no possible way to get the cables back to front! (as they are an L shape). I would reccomend that you remove the power connector for the old drive, and then SATA drive in and install windows [you might need a floppy disc that should have come with the motherboard, it has the drivers so windows can use SATA drive]. when you have doen this simply copy your documents etc off the old drive onto your new one (set the SATA drive as the first boot device, connect old hard drive back to the power supply). You might have a slight problem copying the files if you have enabled file protection, but this can be sorted easly using the admin account (on the SATA windows install), but we will get to that later
