IMHO, the sata/pata drives are not to blame, are you sure you have installed the sata drivers BEFORE you made the image? Windows don't care from what disk you boot them from (it's all hard disks to them) but they DO care if they want to load a sata driver and cannot find it...

Two things:

1) Is the newly imaged PATA/IDE drive set to boot before the old SATA HDD or the SATA HDD has been removed from the controller port ???

2) After making the image of the HDD, is the new image set to be an ACTIVE partition ???

Only active partitions can be bootable....

Also, some imaging apps will make a copy and HIDE the newly created HDD image rather then making it unhidden and active 😉

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I managed to find the problem, and it might be useful for others to know the solution. As it turns out, it was not an SATA/PATA problem.

What was happening, is right after I had made the clone of the drive, I restarted the system with both the target and source attached, as I wanted to verify the integrity of the image. Little did I know that windows XP was screwing around with my drive letters, setting the boot drive on my newly created image to D instead of C. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to undo this once the damage has been done. The solution was to just boot off the new image immediately after cloning (with the source drive removed from the system completely)

I know on my old PATAs if I copied a partition from master to slave, Windows would stall at the logo screen after I reversed them.

If I reversed them first and copied from slave to master everything would go fine.