I used a Clear Sky boot CD to create an image of the internal hardrive. Clear Sky is a Windows XP boot environment on a CD and it has Norton 11. I use this to backup and restore numerous systems.
Well, that may be, but using something so antique for modern media like SSDs isn't necessarily the best idea. Even more when it's something made by Norton (yuck!)
There are many better tools out there. Personally, I use EaseUS ToDo Backup Free, which can create USB and ISO recovery media (Linux and Windows PE based, so you can add Windows drivers if necessary) and which has worked fine transferring the W2k and XP images of numerous older instruments to SSDs.
So today, I un-hooked the internal IDE hard drive and hooked up a Samsung 500 GB SSD to one of the SATA ports (the one I could reach without a total tear-apart). Anyway, I used Norton 11 to restore the SSD with the image I recorded. It went well, but now when the SSD boots, it gets to the Windows 2000 BLUE Screen of death. It is stating "inaccessible boot device" after seeing Windows to start to boot. I have attached a picture of the screen.
That very much suggests your SATA port is using AHCI mode (and AHCI support in W2k isn't great and often causes issues). You can avoid this by using a decent SATA-to-IDE bridge adapter, however if the IDE cable is 44pin then you might hit a problem with faster UDMA modes which can cause data corruption.
Frankly, for a W2k based instrument with IDE port I'd just get a decent IDE SSD like the Transcend PSD330 Series which already has a firmware fix for the UDMA issue and which, unlike SATA drives, doesn't require TRIM support by the OS to keep the drive healthy.
Thank you. Also, I don’t think Windows 2000 can support a partition over 256mb.
The following is from memory:
Windows 2000 can boot from partition sizes up to 2TB (MBR limit) when formated with NTFS (FAT32 partition limit is 32GB).
There also was a limitation in the stock Microsoft IDE driver in W2k and XP pre-SP2 I believe which limits the recognized drive size to 137GB. I'm not sure W2k Sp4 fixed that. That limitation goes away when appropriate IDE drivers are used.
On my dell M6600 laptops, I know you can set the Hard Drive to IDE or HCHI () mode. I have an XP, W7, and Win 10 boot drive for that machine. I have Win10 set up as AHCI (). I found if I leave the 1tb data drive (ide) in the machine with the Windows 10 boot drive, Windows 10 corrupts the 1tb data drive (IDE mode). So when that machine is running Windows 10, I have to pull the IDE data drive. I should have left the Windows 10 SSD set up as IDE.
Running a SATA SSD in IDE mode is a bad idea because you lose several important functionality, one of which is TRIM support to keep the drive healthy.
A Dell Precision M6600 is powerful enough to run XP and Windows 7 in a VM with little performance penalty, which you can do using Hyper-V which comes with Windows 10.
Anyway, with this scope, I’m guessing, Windows 2000 can’t run on a 500gb Drive.
I'd be surprised if you couldn't, it's more likely your specific approach is failing you here.