Load Backup Image to New Harddrive With Macrium

This is probably a really stupid question, and I apologize upfront if this has been ask before and or for the stupidity of the question.
But I recently purchased a new hard drive, and to this point have been utilizing Macrium only for backup images.

What I'm trying to do is copy a working image of my old hard drive including the OS Xp, to the new hard drive, but the pc won't boot with the copy installed on the new hard drive!

Does the new hard drive have to first have windows xp OS loaded before applying the image?

Thanks for any advise!

If you're just changing the hard drive, it goes like this.
Make an image to a non-system partition of the old drive, or another drive, but not to the new drive, unless it's on to a non-system partition.
Really have to know how your partitions are set up to give exact advice.
You might have a system reserved partition. I can't advise on that.
Make sure you have burned a Macrium recovery CD.
Connect your new drive. I would put this on the first controller slot, so it will be disk 0.
Make sure your old drive is connected. I would move this to the drive 1 controller slot.
Change boot sequence in BIOS so you boot with the Macrium CD.
Restore the image to the new drive. Make sure you know what partition is what.
I don't know the Macrium restore options, but the restored partition on the new drive should be marked as active, system.
Change boot sequence to the new drive.
Should boot to the new drive like it did with the old drive.
If you have more questions, ask. But provide more detail.
Plenty of guys here know this up and down.
You didn't get a quick response because you didn't give enough detail, and you mentioned XP in a confusing way.

Thanks for the reply! A day later, I read my post again, and your right, it was somewhat confusing!
But your explanation makes perfect sense. I'm trying to load a previous backup image from an external hard drive, to the the new hard drive so I may have to try your approach instead.
I will study the partition issue on the original hard drive and think this over.
I really wanted to use an earlier image, rather than prepping a new one, as the old hard drive has some issues today that I don't want carried over to the new hard drive.
I guess that's why I thought I could use a full system image from an earlier date, located on my external backup hard drive and mount it to the new hard drive.
I will try some of your suggestions and if I'm still having problems, I will post again, with more concise details!
Thanks again for your time and help!!