Clone a dual booting IDE hard drive to a SATA hard drive
 

I have friend with a dual booting system:

Windows XP & Mepis 7 64-bit Linux... Useing grub (This will need to be edited I believe to find Windows and the Linux distro)

Can I boot the system system using "parted magic" or another Linux Live CD to clone the 80 gig IDE drive attached as a sdc1 to the Larger 320 gig SATA drive sda0... If I set bios to use Sata, the CD drive is still available...

The 80 gig drive was installed in a motherboard that provides support for both IDE and SATA - ECS ASterope3/RC410

I am not certain about windows, I may need to reactivate with the hard drive change that will not be a problem, tis only a phone call if it will boot with the SATA drive after cloning...

I then can adjust the partitons sizes, using any linux Live CD...

Might have someone already recently accomplished this feat, and have a Live CD suggestion...

JR

Hello,

I'm not 100% sure, but it should work as you expect.

First, I would make sure that both Windows and Linux kernels from your current installation support SATA drives. You can attach the SATA drive and see if you can access it from both systems.

Read grub man and find out what changes you need to make after cloning the disk. With proper config you can even try to boot Linux from your SATA drive without disconnecting the IDE drive, using already existing boot loader on the IDE drive. In fact the whole operation should be possible when you boot into your existing Linux installation, without need of live CD.

To boot Windows you probably must make your new SATA drive to have the same drive letter (C: or something), so you will have to disconnect or disable your IDE drive. (Interesting is that you mentioned your IDE drive is discovered as /dev/sdc, so it may happen, that when both disks are installed the first partition on SATA one - /dev/sda1 - becomes C: without need of any changes in BIOS settings)

For cloning, partition manipulation etc. I recommend SystemRescueCd,

Good luck.