Can I use maxblast software to clone my present Maxtor HD to a new WD HD? The Maxtor has Vista Ultimate and is PATA while the WD is a new SATA drive. I also have a Seagate SATA in another box. Could I use discwizard to accomplish the same thing even though neither drive is a seagate? I know that the latest seagate discwizard supports Vista while I haven't found a WD utility that is supported with Vista. I'm not sure about MaxBlast. To sum up, the source drive is Maxtor PATA while the new one is WD SATA.

Yes, you can clone those drives using the said HDDs/Software.

Thanks for the reply. I'll back up my music, photos, and finance just in case.

Gonna use Seagate's discwizard software.

Deliberate thread hijack underway.

I installed a new WD Velociraptor last night. I did a hardware install and disk format using XP Pro. I used WD's utilities to clone the old boot drive onto the new. The utility did recognize some files were on the disk (System Info files) but said it would overwrite them. Here's the rub:

During the boot cycle the system stops. I am faced with a black & white screen asking whether I want to use "this" system or "that" system. Not only shouldn't the boot stop, I shouldn't have to answer this question. Answering either "this" or "that" yields the same result - the system boots up just fine.

It's almost as if there are two operating systems and it's asking me to choose which I want to boot to. Alternatively, it's almost as if it didn't boot up properly last time and stops to ask if I want to continue to boot or whether I want to boot into "safe mode".

What caused this? Was it a mistake to format first and then run the WD utility?

How do I fix it?