SATA drives - what you need to know on older systems

Modern motherboard cater well for SATA as do recent iterations of various operating systems, but older pcs can be a challenge.

It's good to understand the basics.

Drivers for the SATA type drive must be loaded in addition to the standard set provided by XP install disks.. see for example this good post on how to chkdsk a troublesome sata drive: http://www.windowskb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/windows-xp-support/99602/Running-CHKDSK-on-a-SATA-Harddrive.

The other little conundrum is when a cloning an IDE to a new bigger better faster SATA drive, all goes well until the system is rebooted. Assuming you remember to set the bios boot options to chose the sata disk, then you'd think all would be well.
But if you leave the old ide source disk connected, then Windows in its wisdom enumerates the original partitions drive on the old drive from C, resulting in the new operating system on the sata drive with a drive letter other then C - sometimes way down the alphabet (if there are partitions more or usb media card readers) .

I don't know about you, but I found it unnerving to have windows on the J drive!

Granted it may actually work, but why mess with things you don't gotta mess with? (Especially on a customer's system where you cannot possibly test all the programs)?!

The trick is to UNplug the old ide drive the first time you boot the system after cloning. AND you need to delete the partitions or format the old drive as well before plugging it back in.

Reading here shows others have found this out too: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_21664352.html?sfQueryTermInfo=1+10+30+drive+id+letter+sata+xp
Summary after cloning, remove the source disk, or else windows will see two identical volume identifiers and assume something is wrong..
So the moral of the story is: (a) clone the drive; (b) switch the drives or remove the source; and (c) THEN reboot. Delete the partition on the source using another PC (or with the destination disk removed). Then put the source back and the now clean original disk which will come up missing but can be added in again using the disk manager. This works even from IDE to SATA (where you want to put the old small IDE disk back in as a backup drive and use the new, fast SATA to boot and work from most of the time).

Another example
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_21281623.html?sfQueryTermInfo=1+10+30+drive+id+letter+sata+xp

Oh, and one other useful post I found summarises as:

once WinXP has rebooted in after a fresh install of the operating system get your motherboard cd driver disk and install the winxp Sata/ Raid drivers before you install sp2 or anything else.