I have just installed a new SATA II hard disk which i intend to use as the replacement for my existing IDE Primary drive. I want to use my old IDE as a secondary drive and make an exact copy of my IDE drive onto my new SATA drive, making it primary.
I have tried to use Maxblast to do this but it doesn;t seem to want to. Hence I'm wondering is it necessary to reinstall windows from scratch when switching to a SATA II drive?
Thanks.

If you want to clone your IDE to your SATA, then you should make the SATA the slave drive first. Boot into the IDE drive and then clone the IDE to the SATA. After the cloning is complete, switch the SATA to be the master drive and the IDE being the slave. Boot up your system and you'll have everything loaded onto the SATA drive.

I have not used Maxblast for disk cloning/imaging, but have used Arconis MigrateEasy serveral times and it works like a charm. MigrateEasy performs the cloning process outside of Windows, so the job goes much faster and without being interrupted by warnings and services and the likes. Be warned though: the program didn't run well with 98 machines for some reason.

Thanks very much. will give it a try.