Good evening and thank you for allowing me to join the Dell Forum. It is an honor to be here. Recently, I got the rare and exciting opportunity to 'renovate' a friend's Dell Dimension 2400.
One of the key challenges is the owner would prefer Not to do a fresh OS install because they have expensive software on the stock hard drive and lost the product keys.
Based on some comments from rdunnill on this thread: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/t/19496663 it
would appear that I could clone the stock IDE hard drive to a new SATA drive using
Acronis True Image, then connect the SATA drive using a PCI to SATA controller card.
My main concern is how I could actually boot from the SATA drive being that it's
connected through the PCI > SATA controller? The Syba controller card comes with
special drivers which I assume would either have to be installed in a runtime or
installation environment.
Do you think I could get by installing the SYBA drivers to the Old IDE hard drive
before I clone it, that way they would just be there on the new SATA drive, OR do you
think I will need to use a boot loader (and would the boot loader also need the SYBA
drivers on it?
Many thanks,
3rdtimothy
rdunnill