Trouble Expanding a volume.

I have an 80GB drive with 3 partitions. It was running in a RAID 1 on Server 2003. We had a drive failure and chose this opportunity to resize the drive. Since it is just a simple 2 drive RAID 1, here is what I had planned to do.

I've removed the bad drive so the array is still booting fine as a degraded RAID. I took the original smaller good drive and cloned it to a bigger drive (using a 2nd box with a USB dock for 2 drives). Put the new bigger drive (albeit all the size is in unallocated space) back in and all is well the RAID card is barking that there is a drive failure of course, but the clone works perfectly.

Now I power down and remove the drive back to my 2nd machine. I then choose to resize the OS volume to utilize the unallocated space (of course I have to append it to that volume and such). Now when I boot it goes to a looping restart, I can try safe mode but no luck as it too reboots (no BSOD though).

I am using the standard DD version since it is not actually installed on Server 2003, and I don't need any of its features such as GPT or RAID-5.

Am I naive in thinking this should work? A single drive in a 2 disk RAID 1 has no parity information it is a bit for bit real time clone, essentially no different than if no RAID was there at all once you degrade it. Therefore I should be able to resize the volume just like I would on any normal boot drive. Obviously the clone part worked fine so why not the rest?