Restoring image on a new drive

I took a backup of the entire windows partition from my current drive using drive XML and restored it to a new drive.
The new drive does not have the MBR written, so i used the windows repair disk to repair it. Btw Im doing all this on a laptop, and I removed the source drive and put in the new drive with the partition restored.

The repair disk prompted me that there was a windows partition present but the MBR didn't have an entry, I don't remember the exact promtp . So I hit the 'repair and restart' button.
After my laptop restarted i saw the familiar logon screen with my profile, after logging in, it showed a message of 'preparing your desktop', which is wierd according to me, and then after that, it showed a blank light blue screen, with 'Windows 7 build (something)' and 'This copy of windows is not geniune' message on the bottom right...
The screen was blank non-responsive for the most part...pressing ctrl+alt+delete did take me to the familiar options screen. So I fired up the task manager and started the explorer.exe task. It then showed the taskbar at the bottom and startmenu and stuff..but clicking on the folder like my home folder from the start menu gave me a message like 'nothing here to show' or something..

Where did I go wrong? I thought it would restore my entire system as it is...

It sounds like drive-letter slippage which can occur during reimaging causing non-genuine lockout.

The solution which has worked before is Paragon Rescue -change drive letters.

If not try reimaging again and this time Mark Partition Active (Method Two) the Win7 or it's 100mb Boot partition Active to run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times.

Most imaging apps should offer to mark the image Active, make partition Primary, and copy the MBR and/or Track1. Check the options as you go.