Cannot clone my HDD anymore, and it used to work!!

I've been cloning HDDs for years, initially with Partition Magic 8, more recently with Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.

I've even successfully cloned this machine using my drives only 2 weeks ago, but now I cannot do it!!

I have 2 Samsung Spinpoints, one is really noisy and houses my system partition - I want to RMA it. So I decided to ditch my Movie drive and copy the entire system contents of the system drive over to my second identical Samsung drive using Disk Director.

The copying goes well, all done, no errors reported. The patition on the second drive is set to be Primary Active NTFS. The old drive is disconnected, and the new drive is put in exactly the same position using the same cables, and set to Cable Select (just like the old drive).

The drive is detected, the booting process starts, no errors are reported. The Windows XP splash screen is shown, and then just where it is meant to show "loading your personal settings" the screen goes black. It stays black for 20 seconds and then turns blue and gets into and endless loop. The mouse cursor changes from the standard Win XP one to my 3D cursor and then changes back, repeatedly. The HDD stays running locked in this loop.

I've cloned the drive 4 times, each time with the same result. I even cloned a 2 week old copy from another drive (yes I have a few drives atm) and the same thing happens.

Is this some form of new anti-copy protection that has been sneaked in by Microsoft. Are we no longer able to clone drives and then boot from them as a backup? How are we meant to be able to transfer our system partitions to a new drive?

I'm totally stumped as to what is going wrong. I've been at it for 5 hours now, and could really do with a little bit of a hand from you knowledgable lot How cam a drive be successfully cloned from 2 different HDDs and have exactly the same error?

I've tried searching on this, but cannot find anything useful atm. I know in the past if you tried to clone a copied XP Pro install an error similar to this happened later in the boot process, but this is a VLK edition that has been cloned many many times in the past as a backup (and recovered a few times as well.....)

 

Opps, sorry people. I have just found this post https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=62792 where someone else is having the same problem.

The advise was the Disk Director cannot clone a drive and make it bootable, you have to use True Image 8. Could someone please explain this to me? I do not understand how you can clone a drive with Disk Director, and the result give me the problems that I am currently experiencing !?! I really would like to understand more aobut why what I have done does not work, even if it is just a link to answer