SATA drivers from DELL

"guessing since I copied a cloned SATA drive to an IDE drive the lack of SATA drivers is whats causing this glitch. The drivers are for the controllers & not the HDD themselves & anyhow I don't see how the lack of SATA drivers affects the IDE HDD. What happens in safemode?

This is what is confusing. On a computer less than 2 years old like my Dell Dimension, are SATA drivers needed when one does a fresh install on WIN XP PRO or HOME?

It depends - most recent motherboards have a setting (in the BIOS) that allows the SATA HDD autodetect to be simulated as IDE, if you have a system like that, you won't need to install additional driver for the SATA controllers. Regardless though, this won't matter eitherway if you are trying to install Windows on an IDE HDD.

Since the cloned drive appeared to be cloned but it dfidn't function like one I figured maybe there was some gremlin causing these freezes like no SATA drivers, or perhaps the SATA drivers that may have been copied over and functioning on a non SATA drive. Lots of variables in which I have no knowledge of. I have a worse situation now as the source driver I cloned is now screwed up in which the drive letters got messed up and now I get a Microsoft warning that I may not have a legitimate copy of Windows XP Pro and this drive was the factory installed drive from DELL with XP Home...