Monday, 10 Mar, 2008

After sharing the same Asus AMD PC with my wife for sometime, we've decided to get one each.

'Though, provisioning a new PC for her, it would've meant re-installing Windows XP from scratch and re-customising all her Desktop & re-installing all her programs (unacceptable!).

So I thought of making 2 New Computers by cloning the Hard Disk Drive of our old, shared Asus AMD PC.

In other words, I wanted to clone the Asus AMD PC's main HDD to two New HDDs (one per New PC), with the objective of retaining the same data, programs, settings and customisations for both computers.

It's a little bit convoluted to explain, so I'll use an example:

BEFORE:

  • Single Asus AMD PC shared between Andrea and wife.

 

AFTER:

  • Andrea gets to use a New PC (Gigabyte PC) that has the same Asus AMD PC data (ie. without having to re-install Windows or lose any data).
  • Wife gets to use a New PC (Biostar PC) that has the same Asus AMD PC data (ie. without having to re-install Windows or lose any data).

Hope the above make sense.

 

Now, if you'd like to read about Andrea's New PC experience, please refer to this previous article: XP clone & migrate (without reinstall) & follow-up: http://www.pwrusr.com/dirty-hacks/access-ahci-ncq-sata-hdds-from-xp-with-intel-ich9-sb

Here's a short summary of the linked articles:

  1. Cloned orignal SATA HDD (ie. originally connected to the Old Asus AMD MB) to a New spare, blank IDE HDD (by using Ubuntu and dd).
  2. Connected the cloned IDE HDD to another new intel Gigabyte MB, and all went fine (all recognized and all): end of story (End of linked article summary).

So the Gigabyte intel MB became Andrea's main PC.

 

Now, I'll share how I went about provisioning my wife's New PC.

 

Given what I wanted to do was to *also* port my original Asus AMD MB Windows XP install to another (additional) MB (precisely, a still good and slightly old Biostar P4M800 M7 A with an intel P4 Prescott 2.8Ghz HT EM64T, VIA PT890 Chipset + VT8237 SB & SATA), before putting my New computer in production:

  • I cloned the Asus AMD PC HDD once again(!), this time to a different SATA HDD.

This was meant to become my spouse's pc - for practical reasons she needed hers and I needed mine, 'though both our data was residing on our previously shared Asus AMD MB xp install.

As soon as the cloning process finished, I took this New SATA HDD and connected it to my wife's New Biostar MB (to the Integrated VIA SATA Controller).

Upon the first boot (and all subsequent restarts) it kept BSOD-ing.

I said: DaN, Why??? After some thinking I figured out why - the reason was due to an Unknown SATA port on the VIA Controller (ie. unknown to Windows XP, which seems obvious after reading this, but while you are doing it it's another thing) - In conclusion, there were no VIA SATA drivers, so Windows XP complained about it with BSODs!

I thought that, if Windows XP was smart enough, it would've searched for SATA Drivers on its own Drivers Store.

So I searched for the Via SATA Storage controller drivers. My best bet was at the manufacturer's website (BIOSTAR in this case). After following some links, I found what I was looking for: VRAID_DRIVER_V550B.ZIP SATA Drivers.

I grabbed a copy and placed it within my flash drive.

Next, I booted my spouse's PC with Ubuntu live and connected the flash drive (with the Via SATA Storage controller drivers).

I opened the driver's zip file and looked for the right bits:

  • Bingo - VRAID_Driver_V550B\VRAIDDrv\XP\x86\viamraid.sys

From Ubuntu, I copy-pasted the drivers sys file to:

  • C:\Windows\system32\drivers

Then I've removed Ubuntu live and the flash drive & Rebooted the Windows xp system.

To my surprise, I discovered It worked(!).

[UPDATE-2012-03-22]: Reviewed some grammar.... [UPDATE-2017-02-05]: Reviewed whole article - it didn't make any sense 🙂
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