Hello,
I had XP Pro SP2 installed and running on drive C: a 320GB SATA HDD. I installed Vista Business Upgrade to another SATA 160GB Drive that I designated Z:. I had to start the installtion from XP since this was an upgrade disk. During install opted to install it to Z: and it did the job. I got a dual boot machine with the os boot menu at startup.
I bought another HDD a 400GB drive and want to transfer the Vista OS on Z: to this drive.
I booted from Maxtors Maxblast 5.0, and used the clone disk feature to copy the partition on Z: to the new disk.
Then I unplugged the 120GB disk and connected the new 400GB disk in its place. All disks are SATA.
Booted the machine.
Got the Dual Boot Menu.
Boot to Vista resulted in an error windows/system/bootloader.exe not found or something like that.
So I Boot to XP that worked fine.
Saw that this new disk was been auto assigned drive letter G:
I manually changed drive letter assignment to Z:
Then using a utility vista boot pro I fixed the broken boot menu to point to vista on Z:.
I noticed that the boot menu did not have a drive letter assignment for the new drive even thought the partition(s) including the MBR was cloned.
Rebooted and selected the vista option.
This time vista starts loading, but when it gets to the desktop it stops because vista assigns this drive that its seeing for the first time drive letter G: and all program paths in registery are Z:.
If I unplug this drive and go back to the old one everythign works great.
So my question is how can I get vista to recognize this drive as Z: and not auto assign it as G: that screws everything.

Does it do the same thing if you boot up in safe mode?

What happens if you assign G to the Vista drive in Vista Boot Pro ? If that doesn't work, you can try to clear out the boot options in Vista Boot Pro and then reset everything.