Cannot clone a Vista HD

[bdunn]

I have a compaq presario F700. The internal hard drive is near full. I purchased a 500 Gb laptop drive and a USB Sata adapter that came with cloning software. The software says it successfully cloned the drive but I cannot boot with it. I can see all the files on the drive. A startup repair fails. I've tried other cloning software with the same result. I never had a problem cloning all earlier versions of windows.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Bruce

[glc]

The drive may have hidden partitions and/or a non-standard boot sector or MBR. Have you tried high quality cloning software such as Acronis True Image in advanced mode to see exactly what you are dealing with?

[bdunn]

Niether norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or Fog can successfully get this drive working. In all cases after it failed I tried the Windows startup repair and then I get a black screen saying operating system not found from then on.

I'm beginning to think there may be a BIOS issue but there are few BIOS settings that are changeable on this machine and I have not found a newer BIOS.

[glc]

Use the Compaq recovery media to install the new drive clean, then connect the old drive with your USB adapter to recover your files.