cloned OS drive does not boot... (however...)

version of TI: WESTERN DIGITAL free

OS: win 7 ultimate x64

drives involved: source 120gb ssd / destination WD 250gb ssd

situation:

120gb drive is old and could potentially die after years of use, so i wanted to clone the old drive to the new drive to prevent this from being a problem.  downloaded the WD version from WD's site, installed it, used the automatic option for cloning 120 to the 250, program runs without flaw and everything looked to be in order, shut down pc, removed 120gb drive, started pc back up... failed to boot, gave various prompts (changed several times durring the last 6 days of trial and error, bottom line is that the new drive isn't bootable).  no repair of the mbr and/or bcd changed the boot issue.  none of the attempts to repair the drive and make it bootable worked, thus i'm here to seek potential help... and share a strange thing i have discovered today as well.

here's the list of things i've done to save anyone willing to try and help some time:

i've used the win 7 dvd and tried the automated start-up repair

used the win 7 dvd and the command prompt with all proper commands to repair the mbr/bootloader/bcd (bootrec.exe with the following options: /fixmbr ; /fixboot ; /rebuildbcd)

[note that when running "bootrec.exe /scanOS" a report of no windows installations is given in the cmd window, however the win7 dvd can find the drive and installed copy of win7 that was cloned]

the new drive is set to: active, primary, system, boot, and so on (all settings are right for it to boot, but it fails every time*)

i've read dozens of these types of problems, tried 60% of them (the other 40% want you to install questionable software to "fix" the problems, not an option given that the acronis software shouldn't need a 3rd party fix to complete a clone and make a bootable drive.)

all other system settings remained exactly as they have for a very long time, so i know they are not the issue in any way, the only thing that changed was the brand and size of the OS drive, all other settings remained the same (save for the new drive being set in bios to be the bootable drive.

* I have found a way to access the new drive, but it's a short term fix: leave the win7 dvd in the optical drive but DO NOT press any key when it asks, amazingly the OS will boot without fail after the time-out to press any key to boot from cd ends.  this is great considering that the original drive was formatted after windows booted a few times (only because i'd forgotten to remove the win7 dvd from the drive)  this leads me to believe that no only is the drive not bootable it feels like cmd is missing (similar to how a old pc in the ms-dos days wouldn't boot without autoexec.bat, config.sys, and command.com in the root of the drive, something that to the best of my information isn't part of win7 and up, at least not in the ways it was prior to win7)

many forum posts relate to this problem and going from a drive of X size to a larger drive and allowing the software to automatically resize the partitions to use all the space of the new drive, this would be a HUGE bug considering the default option to delete the source disk after the cloning is done (which i disabled, and asked myself who would make deleting the source on by default leading to many people loosing any chance to revert or use the old drive).

i have one option left to try after i post this, using the TI bootable media (just made a usb thumb drive for this) in the hopes that it will properly set the drive to boot and allow the system to run without keeping the win7 dvd in the optical drive.

little extra info: i'm a vet of computers and the like, with over 20 years of this stuff, not even in the dos command line only days did i ever have a problem like this, and modern software should make it painless, not like using fdisk, format, and all those other old dos commands to get the job done, so i only have two questions: 1) is there any hope? 2) will someone look into this clearly common problem with the software and solve the problem of OS disk cloning WITH partition resizing to fit new larger drive. (i feel like the automatic resize is the real issue here, others reported that with manual settings and matching partition sizes regardless of new drives size doesn't produce this problem at all, so the failure is IMHO caused by the auto-resize feature of the software; a huge oversite, likewise the default option to delete the source drive after cloning isn't exactly the smartest default setting either... not everyone will uncheck that option and could find themselves in an even worse situation then I have.)