I've cloned an ide hard drive(running Windows XP) to an external usb drive and then onto a sata hard drive. It all worked fine but when I try and boot up the sata computer it goes to the main boot up menu but then just reboots the computer. I've checked the BIOS settings and they seem fine. I did a new XP install on the sata drive and it worked fine so the drive is ok. I used Macrium Reflect and it seemed to do everything, I did the "fix windows boot problems" thing but got the same problem - reboot after reboot. Is it something to do with the ide to sata thing? I couldn't find anything in the Reflect documentation detailing that. Any ideas? Cheers
Windows will still be looking for the IDE interface using the drivers from your original install - what you need to try, is clone the IDE image onto the SATA drive, then run a Windows Repair from your XP CD - this should detect the SATA interface and correct things. No guarantee tho - sometimes, its just easier to start from scratch.
Whats the motherboard? Some boards run the SATA in IDE mode and then there shouldnt be an issue. Some boards NEED a driver for sata, as its on a separate non-native controller. Even if the sata controller isn't separate, it can have different modes, like AHCI/RAID/IDE/COMPATABILITY, which possibly needs a driver, and can be toggled in the BIOS.
The repair mentioned above might need to do the press F6 and use a floppy with driver.
On some PC's, the manufacturer loads their own recovery tools/software onto the drive . This can really screw with HD cloning as - there may be a customer bootloader - the C: may not be the 1st partition, the '1st partion' might be a recovery partitions that the cloning software cant cope with Sometimes & need to try 3 or 4 different brands cloning software when I get that particular issue.
But more than likely its a Sata issue. Disable AHCI in the bios (set Sata to IDE Mode) or put the IDE drive back in & install Sata/Ahci drivers for the mother board
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