new hdd woes

I have an older Asus P4P800se motherboard and the IDE HDD is starting to suffer, so I decided to upgrade to a SATA HDD using a SATA Dual-Channel PCI Host Cont to interface with the old motherboard until I decide to upgrade it as well. It's all connected now and the device manager sees the new SATA drive and says it's functioning properly, but since I was hoping to just copy the whole deal from the old drive onto the new one, I'm finding that I can't seem to get the new drive designated as a potential destination. I'm definately new at all this and would appreciate any help! Do I need some kind of imaging program or should I update the Bios or whaaat? Thanks in advance

 

Try a hard dosk copier, like this one.
http://majorgeeks.com/HDCopy_d1288.html

 

Right click My Computer, click manage, click disk management in the lower part of the frame that comes up, and you should see both hard drives.
The new hard drive should show as raw, and you need to click on that drive,to work on it, and format it, first .

 

Go to the top, click action, and choose format from the list,

 

Not sure if the P4 can boot from sata, even with bios update. Check with Asus first.

 

I appreciate the input! I have undertaken you're recommendations and it appears to be working....just waiting on all the files to finish copying to the new drive! I'll keep you posted.....Thanks much!!!!

 

Just occurred to me...... As I would like to designate the new drive as the OS drive and just use the old one as storage and OS backup......... Can I just change the bios configuration to have the computer boot from the new drive... or am I oversimplifying the task?????

 

Files just finished copying..........looks good but the pagefile/system file did not copy .......everything else appears to be good.......Is this OK or normal.......I did use the copy program you recommended???? Thanks again!!!!

 

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll definately look into it!!

 

To use your old drive as a slave drive, shut down, if copy is complete. Then change the jumper (the little white/black plastic piece that is on the back of the drive to the slave position, Start computer, and right click my computer manage, disk management, again, and it should show like the original did, as the seperate drive/partition.Format it ,as before, and then you can use it as an additional drive.
The paging file only keeps stuff you are using, as a fast recall, and all that has happened is that it has emptied- This will make initial paging file, quicker.
If you go to My Computer, right click, properties, advanced, settings, advanced, and down bottom, you can see the virtual memory(paging file), and just check to see that it is one and a half times the ram you have installed if you have less than a gigabyte of ram.