In reply to a post by wanapoo:

I've read through the entire post, and nobody has pointed out that the SATA hard drive your trying to put into your new pc is 6 years old.

6 years ago, SATA drives didn't support the modern/high performance modes which the SATA controllers use these days. Inside your bios, check to see in the advanced menu's for the SATA controller, if you can change it down to either compatability mode or IDE emulations. without that change Windows will just hang because the hard drive doesn't know how to respond.

In doing the above, your compromising the overall performance of your SSD and PC, because it will be the cause of a bottle neck.

Not actually true - the disk supports NCQ which is pretty much what AHCI seems to be about and is rated at 3Gb/s (i.e. SATA II). Moreover, today's breakthrough came when I attached the disk to a SATA III (yes, 3, i.e. 6Gb/s) socket - but on the Marvell controller, wouldn't work on the Intel controllers.

In reply to a post by Deadbeat:

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

If this was the case, Windows wouldn't load at all.

It would if it was still present on the old disk.

But he stated he formatted it.

Doesn't work on the Intel controllers, because there on the wrong setting in the bios.
Have a read of the user Manual.

To wrap this up tidily:
The old disk would not work on any of the Intel contollers (SATA II or III) but worked quite happily on the Marvell controller on the mobo - SATA III controller with AHCI enabled, disk runs at 3Gb/s as it's only SATA II. I took out a second mortgage and bought a new HDD (Seagate Barracuda, SATA III) which works quite happily on the Intel SATA III ports. I've reformatted the other old disk in my old PC (using a Ubuntu Live DVD) and moved that into the new PC on the Marvell controller and all is fine (although the nice neat Chillblast cabling is now my usual rat's nest!).

Thanks to everyone for their help and very useful suggestions.