A few questions from a relative novice if you can bear with me !
Oh, and Hi ! 1st post !

My IDE hard drive (20Gb) is slowly dying a death and I have the opportunity of getting my hands on a newer, fitter 160Gb SATA drive. I know you can get an adaptor to fit IDE into SATA but can you use it the other way round / would there be major compatibility issues ?? I'm thinking I plug the 'IDE' side into mobo and connect from there as no SATA conns on board.

I back up my personal files on a regular basis so I'm safe on that score but what about my windows set up ?
Is it possible to burn a dvd of my windows set up and just load that up when the new drive is fitted ? I'm thinking I just copy drive 'C:', what else would I need ? As a euphimism, I'm thinking it's like pouring water from a dirty glass into a clean glass and everything will be Hunky Dory.

The reason I ask is that I have done a lot of tweaking in the registry and the operating system and it is now just right for me. It would be a lot easier to be able to load Elmers XP Home rather than Windows XP Home version (I have my M$ disk, just in case, but had problems before re~validating after a re~install) or is it not not going to be as simplec as I imagine?

Although the PC the drive is being donated from is "broke" I'm hoping to get my hands on the whole kaboodle and with a bit of luck. be able to get it up and running again which will just leave part 2 of my problem. The disk does work but it has been wiped clean hence the desire to do a straight software swap.

Hoping someone can help, and please, not tooo technical !!

Recipient:~ Packard Bell iMedia 4716 (Seagate HD)
Donor Part:~ Seagate HD from an Elonex (??) desktop.l

There are USB-SATA adapters, SATA-USB adapters, and even Bidirectional adapters. Just be sure to get the right one.

If you have an imaging program, such as Norton Ghost, or Acronis Trueimage, you can clone your old drive to the new one. This should work fine, as long as bad sectors hasn't damaged the operating system.

Thanks for the quick reply, I'll look into those 2 s'ware programmes you mentioned.
I'm getting a RAW read error rate that hovers between 65 at best, 62 at worse, the red line being 25 and system (seems to) run OK. SpeedFan and HDD Health both tell me this is normal to good. It's the occasional "clicking" I get from hd at boot up that I want to pre-empt before it does die on me !!