NG15 - cloned on 2nd try, partition not formatted - boot - sys updates - boot - hibernated - no boot

Had a tech-house do full check of 7 year old laptop because of excessive heat

Replaced SATA 80G [failing] with SATA 160G in Dell Inspiron 9300

Tech-house created one partition and only installed XP-SP3 and my 'data' - no xfer of registry or installed software

Thus they did not clone my 80G [42G in use]

 

I put my 80G in USB caddy - came up as E drive [CD/DVD is assigned D]

Used easeUS Disk Manager to reduce partition on 160G to 60G so as not to lose operating system created by tech-house

Used Run/compmgmt.msc/Disk Management to create 100G partition on 160G drive [sizes approximate]

Formatted new 100G partition [destination where clone will be deposited] and assigned it drive F

 

Ran NG Disk Copy E to F [make 'active', no MBR] - after 1hr and 4 progress bars, said "not enough disk space for image file"

Looked at 100G partition and its drive letter was gone and was no longer formatted

I reassigned drive letter F and left it unformatted this time

Ran NG Disk Copy - success after 3hrs and 58mins.

Looked at 100G partition and 'in use' matched and destination marked as 'Active' - looked good

Turned computer off and cold started - it booted

Let it sit there a while as there was disk activity which turned out to be system updates [was out of commission for 3 weeks]

Selected 'restart' after updates were done - it booted ok

I said it required another restart and it booted ok again

Did some checking out of MS-Office and other installed software - all worked

Turned the computer off in hibernation - then had a few beers

Next morning - would not boot - just dark screen with flashing underscore in upper left

 

Put old 80G back in and booted - ok [and it did system updates]

Put new 160G in caddy and changed tech-house partition to 'active' on 160G disk

Put new 160G back in and booted - ok

Booted from NG15 CD to see if I could do anything - it ran 'chkdsk' on the cloned partition

- no errors but said it recovered some unallocated space and added to free space

Put 80G back in and got same dark screen and blinking underscore.

 

So what happened?

I am going to start with an unformatted destination [F] partition again

But I am going to make sure original disk gets all system updates, a 'chkdsk' and possibly a defrag.

First I will wait a day or so for responses - thanks.