I have a 120Gb ide drive with xp pro and loads of other software.
I have Norton Ghost installed.
I installed a new 120GB Sata drive as a scond drive. I can see the drive in windows and bios fine!
I copied the older ide drive onto the sata drive using Norton Ghost.
Whilst still having 2 drives installed I changed the system to boot from the sata drive. It booted ok but then just freezes, and I get one or two error messages.

I thought it would be a simple process of copy 1 drive and change the boot sequence - am i wrong? (again )

You have to repair install Windows to give it the SATA drivers it needs to boot up.

I used the Powermax from maxtor to test the sata hard drive and it failed the tests!

I think I need a new one. :hotbounce

Can anyone recommend an alternative hdd utility to test the functionality of the contraption?

The only proper thing to use is the one from the HD maker. Any other tool will only perform generic tests that will not reveal issues with the internals of the drive.

Just have the drive replaced and try again. If the new one fails too then there is something wrong with your setup.

I kinda have doubts that you can ghost IDE to sata. It's been a while since I've read up on that, but for some reason I think the disks are set up differently. I was reading a security article about wiping SATA drives, and it mentioned that there are hidden partitions installed by the manufacturer that hold diagnostic software. By formating the drive you were not able to erase this section of the drive. There was a way with the use of a utility for somebody to actually write to this space, and wiping utilities may not be able to erase this section either, unless designed to. So I am just guessing here, but I'd say that if you ghost something to it, it's going to try to duplicate the IDE structure onto the SATA drive, and it might not do a good job of it. BTW I have never had good luck with Ghost and SATA. I don't think the two like each other. Everybody tells me to use live update before attempting to do anything with SATA. Just my thoughts.

Disk cloning programs are just programs. For any program a disk is a bunch of blocks containing data and these are the blocks that the drive decides to tell you about. A disk is a disk is a disk and you can clone from a SCSI drive to SATA to a USB flash drive since they are all just a bunch of disk blocks.

If there are inaccessible areas on a disk then no cloner will be aware of it or will be able to access them (what would be the point of "hidden" areas if they weren't?) unless some special manufacturer specific routines are used to get access to the drive internals.

Special partitions created by computer manufacturers are another matter - you can run into problems with those but they have nothing to do with IDE or SATA.

I have given up the attempt.
I copied the IDE drive onto SATA drive and I can see all the files, etc. But, when I boot from the SATA it does fire up but then freezez.

If I want to run with SATA as my main drive then it might look like a fresh install and just copy the files I need. I was hoping to be able to just copy the drive and start to boot from SATA - iI thought it was too simple

IDE and SATA dont seem to be friendly to each other :knock:

This has nothing to do with the drives. Your problem is that your WIndows is not installed to boot from SATA.

When you install Windows you have to specifically give it the SATA drivers for it to be able to install to and boot from a SATA drive.

Attach only the SATA drive. Do a repair install of Windows and press F6 when prompted to load your SATA drivers from the floppy. Ater the repair your Windows will be able to boot from the SATA drive.