Cloning HDDs - the right way to do it?

usta said:

I think so. I can see it in disk management, and the recovery program (Dell Datasafe) goes as far as to the point of being ready to restore the factory image.

In fact, everything works fine. I just wonder what could I have done to prevent the initial boot error in Win7, when the newly cloned disk was placed in notebook.

It ALWAYS happens if you modify the starting sector of OS partition. Or you modify disk signature of disk (all disks have a unique disk signature). This because the bootmenu entry points to those values. If you display bcd output using bcdedit it's automatically translated to drive letter or harddisknummer/partitionnumber if drive letter is unknown. But if it's pointing to old none existing partition it's listed as "unknown".

How to use Boot Configuration Data Store Editor (BCDEdit) to manage BCD stores

The correct way to clone hdds is doing it outside the operating system, use clonezilla or acronis or whatever you want, but always perform that operation outside windows.