Unable to boot from Laptop Hard drive connected through USB SATA cable

[inspironuser]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop. I recently developed hard drive trouble and have had to order a replacement.

Instead of installing Windows 7 all over again, with all the drivers, etc., I want to clone my existing hard drive to the new one.

I intend to connect one of the hard drives to my system via a USB SATA cable with the other drive connected inside my system.

To test this, I removed my hard drive and connected it using the USB SATA cable that comes with Seagate Hard drives (Amazon.com: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Cable - USB 2.0 STAE100: Electronics)

I tried booting up my laptop using this setup.

The BIOS does detect the OS on the hard drive and attempts to boot from it, but flashes the BSOD when the Windows logo appears on the screen and reboots to a message that says that I should reseat the hard drive.
It then goes to a menu that asks me if I want to run startup repair or boot normally. Selecting "boot normally" repeats the process.

Any help? What can I do to rectify this problem? And more importantly, how can I make sure that my cloning process will go off without any trouble? I intend to use DriveImage XML for the cloning.

 

[pbcopter]

Windows 7 will not boot and run from a USB drive.
However, that should not interfere with your ability to clone the drive using a USB connection.

 

[strollin]

Exactly. Clone the drive via USB then install the drive in your laptop. It will boot then.