Hi,

Please can someone help me? I have an IDE hard disk with Windows XP Home as one partition, and SuSE 91. Personal (free from a magazine) as a second partition (and third, and fourth partitions, if you include the partitions that were made automatically upon SuSE's installation.) Both my IDE connectors are full - I have four IDE devices (including the hard disk mentioned above, which is getting full). I want to clone my XP and Linux disk to a new, bigger, one, but all I have free is a single SATA connector. I have no Firewire ports at all. So here are my questions (in no particular order):

1) I have read much about problems with Linux and SATA drives. It seems that you can clone to them, but might have problems installing to them. I want to know that I would be able to reinstall linux, if necessary. What is the definitive answer for SuSE 9.1 Personal?

2) I also think it would be shame to (assuming I could) set up a SATA drive in the legacy mode (if this is what's required for it to work at all). And some people say that whether it works will depend on the SATA controller and the kernel version. How do I find out my SATA controller's version code (via Windows would suffice)? And how do I find out my SuSE's kernel version number?

3) I thought that one of the things about SATA was that devices could be added in a daisy-chain manner (as with USB connectors). However, I have also read that you can only add a single device to each SATA connector. Which is true?

4) Having many Windows applications installed, I may, in the future want to have some kind of pseudo-RAID arrangement to back up my disk(although my mother board does not directly support this, I understand that Promise make appropriate cards that are SATA based). If I can use a new SATA drive for my systems, XP and SuSE, would I then loose the ability to have a raid-like backup system? And what else would I be foregoing if I committed my one and only remaining free connector to a device?

Thanks in advance for any enlightenment.