Completing boot drive backup?

[NitroPress]

I have a Win7 system that had a failing boot drive. Since I build all systems with a motherboard RAID-1 array, it survived one drive failure but soon started showing problems on the remaining drive. I have the usual knotty problem of wanting to move the boot drive to a new HDD, but complicated by the fact that the new drive is a software RAID-1 array.

Most of the free and trial tools will not do a disc-image copy to a software RAID setup. I downloaded the trial of Norton Ghost only to find that its disc-image feature is not enabled in the trial copy. I used Ghost to make a complete backup of the failing boot drive, skipping bad file sectors, and restored the backup to a newly created RAID-1 array. After some mucking around with repair and boot disk settings, the system will boot, but stops short of giving me a desktop - I get only a blue background, with a Windows build notice (and a bogus-copy alert) in the bottom corner. I can call up Task Manager and switch logins to an incomplete desktop.

I really don't want to buy a copy of Ghost to enable the image-copy feature only to find that it won't work on my system... and I hate having to buy such software because my very infrequent uses of it mean I get about one use out of each license. I feel like I'm one simple step from getting my backup to run correctly... can anyone point me to what file or files might have been missed, and what files I can copy from the original boot drive to make things work correctly?

AdTHANKSvance...

 

[NitroPress]

Bump, and simple restatement of the problem.

I have a boot drive restore that boots to a 'dead' desktop. I can call up Task Manager and log in to similarly crippled user desktops. Is there a simple file transfer I can do from the old boot drive to fix this problem?