Norton ghost 14 -- vista --clone hard drive to new bigger drive (bigger drive wont boot vista)

have NG 14 and installed on my visas sp2 laptop, im runnig out of space for my engineering work so got new 500G WD drive - but tried several options  but can never get the bigger drive to boot -- gives error saying winload.exe error - with either message 0x0000000e or 0x0000000c  - dont recall (im on the laptop now with original drive).  the orig drive has 3 partitions a 'recovery' partition, a 'vista' partition and a extended 'data' parttition. I have tried copying the partitions one by one in different orders,  as well as copying over the mbr and checking the src and destintaions for errors, remembering to set the 'vists'partition active. but after swappig out my old driv efor the new one i cant get it to boot - ive trid "updating" my norton 14 ghost via symantec update, seems to make things some what better but in that case i get tthe pc to boot but when windows starts up it says "preparing your desktop"  from which it never recovers. ive tried uninstalling norton with revo uninstaller a few times to try different approaches - i have vista home premium sp2 - was curious if anyone else has had problems. (ive been at this for about 5 days now and am pretty miffed) Ive also tried downloading clonezilla and partitionimage (linux) where the results are even more varied. im downloading  "acronis migrate easy 7" as we speak. Guess im posting this in hopes that someone might have some insight or suggestions. pretty much sick and tired of working on this... does "best buy" do disk cloning as a service? im kinda curious why my legal norton ghost 14 doesnt work (seems like waste of money) but really only care for my data at this point - can anyone offer any suggestions...