Right now i am booting off of an 80gb IDE hard drive but i want to clone the drive onto a 150gb sata drive and make the sata drive my boot drive.

I have used Acronis True Image to clone the hard drive.
I restarted and everything copied over in DOS successfully but then i tried to boot off of the sata drive and everything seemed to work out fine.. Vista load bar showed up, i was able to enter my password to log in and then it said preparing desktop like it was the first time i installed vista.
It was stuck on that screen for a few mins and then a blank blue screen just came up.
it seemed like it was the default background for Windows 2000 or something like that and it just stayed there.

So now i'm back to booting off of the IDE drive...



anyone know what i'm doing wrong?

Brink posted a very good suggestion; it's #3.
Cloning a Drive

I tried Brink's method of cloning the drive but it was just like system restore and just restored my IDE drive and the back up stayed on the sata drive.

Are you verifying the image after you create it? Acronis is good, but you've always got to verify.

hmm no i don't think i did with acronis.

all i did pretty much was choose which drive to clone and where to clone it to and then it rebooted and transferred everything over then i took out the IDE drive and tried to boot with the sata drive

Why is that when someone solves there issues, they never go back post the answer, Maybe Other people had the same issue.