This is topical for me, as just today I went to move my C: (boot) drive w/Vista x64 to a new drive, as the old drive seemed to be failing. (I know you are using XP, but perhaps my experience can serve some purpose.) I purchased Norton Ghost 14 expressly for the purpose of cloning drive-to-drive. Additionally, Ghost says it can clone a C: (boot) drive to a new drive, and make the new drive "Active", which is necessary for it to be bootable.
Well, no it can't, at least not for me. The problem was, the drive assignment "C:" was already in use. So even tho Ghost says it's supposed to take care of this, the drive assignment drop-down in Ghost's Drive-to-Drive config was grayed out. W/some trepidation, I went ahead and cloned anyway.
Oh boy, what a cluster-****.:disgust: Ghost made the new drive "D:", and I could not change it, not even w/Drive Management, because C: was already in use, and esp since C: was a boot drive letter. IOW, many reasons why Windows would not change the letter. And both the old and new disk were marked as "Active"--something Windows had previously said was impossible--i.e. you can't have 2 "Active" drive on one system.
Then I did some even stupider than buying Ghost: I plugged back in my old C: drive, keeping the new "D:" drive also connected. I changed the drive letter of the old C: drive to X:, against my better judgement, hoping to free up the C: assignment once I rebooted, as Disk Management said would happen.
Well, on reboot, I got the usual Vista startup screens, then where it usually says "Welcome", it said "Preparing Desktop". Fine, I thought, I knew Vista had to rebuild the page file, etc. so I waited. The screen next went blue--not a BSOD blue, just a blank, featureless, pastel Windows-color blue. And there it stayed.
I rebooted many times, w/the old drive both attached and unattached. No joy. I tried to fire up Disk Management thru the Computer Management console, but even tho I could start "Task Manager" and try to run programs, it--wait for it--said the path was incorrect.
At this point I had no choice but to try using the Vista CD repair function. It said there was nothing wrong with my "C:" drive. Let me repeat that: "C:" drive, not "D:". So the Vista CD read the drive correctly as C:, but as Windows tried to boot off it, it was getting read as D:. I got stuck in a no-man's land of incomplete boot.
Now there was probably some way to fix this, but I didn't know how, and I was already many hours into this disaster. I can't remember enough of my DOS to know if I could have assigned a correct drive letter outside of Windows. I couldn't boot into Safe Mode either.
Here's where the happy ending comes in: I had the rare foresight yesterday to make a full system backup using the Vista built-in "Complete PC Backup". It was on my real D: drive, which I had temporarily unhooked to do this cloning. It runs off the Vista CD, under "Repair your computer" (or whatever it's called). It automatically does a quick partition and format; I crossed my fingers and hoped this would finally override the bad drive letter assignment. Or that since it was a C: drive backup anyway, that the image stored info about the drive letter assignment and things would get back to normal.
It took maybe 20 minutes. Vista found the backed up image on my D: drive, partitioned and formatted the new drive, and restored the backed up files to the new drive, which it correctly identified as C:.
I won't even go into the hell that was the installing of Ghost in the first place, and one nice advantage of restoring from yesterday's backup is that I hadn't installed Ghost until today, so there was no trace of it on my system. The worst thing that happened was that Norton Internet Security 2009 (which actually works pretty well, I'm surprised to say) complained that it's virus definitions were off--probably had gotten out of sync w/the server because of the time difference of the backup file. That fixed itself right away.
So I guess the moral is, assuming you want everything that's on your first disk to end up on your second disk, do it from a backup. A good backup, one that you've tested, and tested again. Then make another backup on another disk, just to be sure.
I remember XP well enough to know that it reacted more simply to such issues, so rudder's advice to make the 2nd disk active may work. If he's speaking from direct experience, then he's probably right. (I mean, he has way more posts than me! ) But you could also get into a similar situation to me, and I'd hate to see that happen.
And believe me, no one is more surprised than me that it was actually Vista that saved me.