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Can't boot after clone, even with original C drive only

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I have True Image 2011 with windows 7, with four hard drives: 80GB SSD as C, on SATA 1, 2TB HD as D on SATA 2, 2TB HD as E on SATA 3, and 2TB HD as F on SATA 4.

I disconnected F and attached a new 500GB HD, assigned it as M, then cloned C to M.

Now the computer will not boot, even with only the 80GB SSD attached to SATA 1.

Booting True Image from the CD, I can see that the SSD is now showing up as two different partitions, a small one, reserved, with boot data, and a large partition with all the files and folders that showed up originally on C,

If I select windows from the booted True Image CD, windows will come up, although it is not happy the drive for paging is not available, etc.

My plan is to
(1) restore C, SSD, to bootable condition, be able to boot windows directly from C
(2) backup C to F with true image booted CD
(3) remove C SSD and install M 500 GB on SATA 1
(4) boot True Image from CD and restore C image on F to old M 500 GB, to be new C

Does this sound like a valid plan, and PLEASE help with advice how to accomplish step 1.

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Update - it looks like for some reason doing a clone of C to M did away with the master boot record and made the system reserved partition of 100 MB active so that it now shows up. Why?

I tried, with only the new 500 GB hard drive, which has all the files and folders from the old C and reserved partition, to restore the MBR:

(1) with win 7 DVD, went to recovery command prompt, then did bootdrct /nt60 SYS /mbr

but the disk is still not detected and won't boot

(2) with win 7 DVD, went to recovery command prompt, did these three

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

the first two completed fine, but the third said that there were no windows installations, even though the win 7 DVD detects the windows installation on the hard drive fine.

the fix startup command does not help either.

help - why did this get messed up and how can I restore it all?

used diskpart to select the partition with windows THEN ran rebuildbcd, and it worked.

disk now boots, but very slowly.

still want to know how it got messed up.