Can I replace my primary hard drive?

[alonzomourning23]

I have an ide hard drive that's only 5200 rpm. My new motherboard can take the newer, faster ones (think it's called ata). Is there a way to swap hard drives without losing anything?

 

[friedram]

I use

http://www.acronis.com/

for my imaging- reinstalling the os sucks. Run acronis, install the new drive as primary, run the acronis bootup cd, restore from old disk to new disk- viola- everything up and running

Acronis backs up and restores on my machine so fast I don't even have time to read an entire article on the john. It's that fast.