Moving data from IDE to External drive?

[Hedgie]

I have 3 IDE drives that I want to transfer all the data from and put onto a single external sata drive.

Is there a program I can use to do this or can I just select copy and paste. The data consists of files and programs and I don't want to lose anything.

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Hi

You should not have a problem simply copying and pasting the files from one drive to another in it's most basic sense. I am assuming you don't have any permissions set on the files etc?

How much data are we talking?

However you are likely to have a problem with the applications as they are very funny about remembering where they used to be! Your best option for the applications is probably going to be to re-install them on the new drive.

Would it work for you to keep the applications where they are, and just move the files?

Many Thanks

Leo

[leemason]

You can just copy then in Windows Explorer. Are you hoping to move the data off the IDE drives permanently and move to a new PC? If so moving the data is fine but as mentioned above you will have to re-install the applications as (mostly) you can't just move exe files to expect them to work in the new location or on a new PC.

If you want to move to a new PC or wipe the internal IDE drives and replace with internal SATA drives then you are best off imaging the disks (there is plenty of software available to do this like GHOST, TRUIMAGE, etc).

[stugster]

Lee and Leo have basically covered it all. Just watch out though... Windows can be a bit picky about certain file names if they're too long. It craps out and gives up, leaving you in a situation where you're not sure what has copied over and what hasn't.

My advice would be to get something like Unstoppable Copier ( http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29 ) It'll copy the files at a lower level (I'm assuming) so as not having the difficulties of long file names or cyclic redundancy checking.

[MarcusMiller]

Syncback is free and does the same thing and it will give you a report at the end if struggles with anything so you can manually pick up any stragglers.

[drounding]

Richcopy: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog
or Robocopy: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx

are good tools for this.