I have found some problems cloning to USB that go away if the process is carried out inside of the PC that the drive is to eventually reside in. In other words, I wonder what would happen if you had put the 320 into the PC, cloned the 40 to it and then just removed the small drive. I'm willing to bet the 320 would have booted properly. I don't clone to USB drives but will create a compressed image on them that can later be restored to a disk that's in the PC. I've never had a problem with that method and have used two different cloning/imaging utilities over the years.
Can anyone tell me what is going on? WINDOWS XP, running SP3 with all updates. I am also running CA security vrsn 7.00.279 latest updates I started with ghost. All these are IDE drives. From working internal 40 to USB 320, from now internal 320 to USB backup 40. I do this because in ghost I can tell which drive is what and I wiped out my origianl HD once. See next paragraph about problem Got same problem with Macrium. So what am I doing wrong?
I used Macrium to image my internal 40H HDD to my USB 320G. I had the same problem that I had with Ghost.
I like MACRIUM because it gives drive letters, so it easy to see srce vs dest.
Here is what happened,
So I replaced the 40 with the 320. Booted up just fine to my 5 user window. I clicked on the orig EDG user (was the original ADMIN user). I waited some 15 minutes and my background screen finally came up. No icons or start bar. I ctrl alt del it took that about 5 minutes to come up. Nothing unusual showed 99% free time, not sure it was updating fast enough to see anything. Talked with my son-in-law, suggested to boot up in safe mode. Got tired of waiting so I held pwr off for 4 seconds.
I now booted up the 320 in safe mode. Logged into user edg things came up and seemed normal. Shut down computer. Pwrd up computer, and to my surprise got in to user edg just fine things seemed to work just fine now.
So with this revelation,I took my ghost image of the internal 320 to my backup USB 40, (the original disk I wanted as a on the shelf replacement) I did last week. Booted up in safe mode went in to user edg logged out. Booted up normal. went into user edg and it now seems to work just fine.
Keep in mind due to concern of over writting my data disk E, which is on a raid 1 layout, I always unplug them so I can not see or write to them.
Anyone have the slightest idea what is going on? That is why a image/clone using 2 different software programs gave the same strange result. A bootable disk that had issues getting into a user account?

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