Startup repair loop after macrium cloning

Hi,
I have a Lenovo t520 running windows 7. A few months after I bought it, I was getting hard drive Errors from the diagnostics tool so I got a new seagate drive under warranty.

Here is what I have tried so far.
- I used the windows 7 "create system image" utility to creat an image to my new HD which I connected via an external SATA enclosure. It didn't work at first because of an "error on the source or destination disk".
- I ran chkdsk and was able to create an image.
- I swapped in the new hard drive and booted from a system recovery disk that I created with the win7 utility.
- that didn't work - I got an error something like "could not find drive". (I didn't write down the exact message)
- looking through forums, I found that others had had problems with the windows 7 utility so I tried downloading Acronis. The installation failed because of "Microsoft .NET 4 component incompatibility". The link to a trouble shooting page gave me a 404 error.
- I downloaded macrium and created a clone (after formatting the new drive with windows utility to get rid of the previous image)
- I swapped in the new HD - without a recovery CD because my understanding was that you don't need a recovery CD when you make a clone.
- now I have been in the startup repair loop for 13 hours. The error that it gives is always "system volume on disk is corrupt.
Repair action: file system repair (chkdsk)
Result: completed successfully Error code 0x0

At this point, I'm thinking that maybe my original disk was so messed up that it was a mistake to try to copy it and I should just do a clean install - which I was trying to avoid to save time but that totally backfired...

Another data point here is that my system was really getting painfully slow during this whole process. When I powered down a couple of times it installed updates which took over 1 hour! This happened twice.

Now I am concerned about stopping the startup repair loop and powering down because I read in these forums that this can cause irreparable damage to the hard drive.

I would like to get on with my life.
Any advice would be appreciated!

Jana

Jsedivy said:

At this point, I'm thinking that maybe my original disk was so messed up that it was a mistake to try to copy it and I should just do a clean install - which I was trying to avoid to save time but that totally backfired...

That would be my first guess.

Even if the original disk was OK, I'd lean toward doing a clean install.

I'd cut my losses and go with a clean install. If you still have issues, they should become apparent quickly.

Thank you. I will try those suggestions.
Can you tell me how to stop the startup repair loop without damaging my hard drive though?

Jana