Ok you computer geeks, gotta question for ya.

[DeaconDean]

On 8/24/07 I purchased a AMD AM2 MSI K9AGM2-L mobo, with an AMD Athalon64 3800x2 processor. Running 2 Gb ram, Aeneon pc 667, DDR2, 800 mhz (matched pair), Seagate 120 gb Ata HD. 550 watt Atrix 120mm PS. It says its a Socket AMD2, AMD 690 Chipset, running WinXP SP3.

This is my motherboard:

Link

Since then, I have added a GeForce 8500 GT 16x PCI Express, 512 MB video card.

What I would like to do is take my Seagate 120 ATA hard drive out and replace it with two Sata 250 gb hard drives. (Actually, Office Depot has a real good price on these $50.95 each) Is it hard to change from ATA HD to Sata HD?

What special install instructions do I need?

And I would like to, sometime in the future, change from 2 Gb ram to 4 Gb ram.

Thanks.

God Bless

Till all are one.

 

[theartist87]

Fairly easy to do. Your motherboard supports RAID if you want to get that set up as well. I assume you'll want to keep your existing operating system, programs, etc while moving over.

First put in the hard drives. Make sure you're grounded and the machine is unplugged.
If you want RAID 0 so that the two hard drives are combined as one, set that up first. Check your manual on how to do this.

To clone the existing drive over, you'll need some sort of imaging software. Acronis offers a fully functional trial that you can use from within Windows without having to deal with floppies and the like. Get that here: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/

After you've got everything cloned over, you may need to go into your BIOS and set the computer to boot from the SATA drive(s) before the ATA

For upgrading the memory, you can definitely do that, just know with a 32 bit OS you'll only be able to use up to about 3.4 gigs of RAM

 

[DeaconDean]

Fairly easy to do. Your motherboard supports RAID if you want to get that set up as well. I assume you'll want to keep your existing operating system, programs, etc while moving over.

First put in the hard drives. Make sure you're grounded and the machine is unplugged.
If you want RAID 0 so that the two hard drives are combined as one, set that up first. Check your manual on how to do this.

This is exactly what I was wanting.

To clone the existing drive over, you'll need some sort of imaging software. Acronis offers a fully functional trial that you can use from within Windows without having to deal with floppies and the like. Get that here: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/

After you've got everything cloned over, you may need to go into your BIOS and set the computer to boot from the SATA drive(s) before the ATA

For upgrading the memory, you can definitely do that, just know with a 32 bit OS you'll only be able to use up to about 3.4 gigs of RAM

I also read that Digital Image 2003 works a lot like Norton Ghost except that Norton Ghost don't work on WinXP.

And what about "reformating?" Is that done away with with Sata?

And for that matter, it wouldn't be too hard just to reinstall all my programs.

My motherboard only has two DDR2 DIMM ram slots, so as far as that is concerned, all I can do for right now is double my ram.

I have 2 1024 sticks, and I'm wanting to replace them with two 2048 sticks.

Thanks.

God Bless

Till all are one.

 

[theartist87]

If you want to reinstall, go for it. It's nice to start fresh every once in a while. You would do this by running the install CD that came with your computer once you set up the raid volume. Otherwise you can easily copy everything over with Acronis to the new drives.

Your mobo supports a max of 4GB. Here's a nice pack of RAM that would get you the max: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231122

 

[Sketcher]

If you have RAID 0, back up everything on that array daily. Once it's gone, it's gone, and more than one drive increases the chances of it getting gone.

And what about "reformating?" Is that done away with with Sata?

No.

 

[TeddyKGB]

Setting up SATA drives can be tricky with a new install. Windows XP wants chipset drivers but only on floppy. When I set up my XFX-based system last spring, the mobo didn't come with chipset drivers on floppy (they were on the CD). I had to get a barebones PC running with an IDE drive so I could make my driver disks.