Another approach entirely

I have replaced the HDD in a number of IBM "X" series notebooks and they don't even have a CD or CDROM drive!

What I do now, partly because I was too cheap to shell out for the docking station (media slice IBM called it!). My current X40 and X61 have excellent USB support and an external USB DVD-ROM serves me well when restoring the operating system and files to a new drive.

My last 500G external drive cost me not much over $125. With it, apart from backups, I keep images of all my HDDs on all the pcs I administer.

I don't know about Sony, but replacing the drive was really easy with the IBM. Booting from the external USB cd drive and then recovering the image from the USB drive.

I realise that you may not have an image of the old drive, but you could probably do a full XP install from the external drive. I would be reluctant to start pulling IDE cables out of my desktops. I must admit I haven't priced a IDE converter. The imaging software takes care of all the partitioning, formating and transfer of files. I have used the IBM/Lenovo backup image and also Acronis TrueImage. The latter was used to swap out the 30G HDD for a 100G HDD in my IBM R31 - using an external USB drive.

As I say I don't know about Sony.
More Luck
Martin