Failure of cloned Drive to boot

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A year or so ago I used Acronis True Image 2009 to successfully clone my original 80GB hard drive running Windows XP to a new 250GB drive. I used this new drive with no trouble until early this year when it started giving me "missing Hal.dll file" and similar messages. I tried to fix these by following Microsoft's knowledge base instructions for this apparently common problem but was not successful. So instead I used Acronis True Image to re-clone the old 80GB drive back onto the troublesome 250GB drive. This fixed the problem, although of course I had to re-install applications I had installed over the last year, and update my files from my backups. The 250Gb drive continues to work just fine, but I am of course now apprehensive about a similar bout of missing hal.dll etc in the future.
Since I had another 250GB drive not being used, I hit on the idea of cloning this drive from my working 250GB drive and keeping it as a back up. I can update this clone at intervals to keep up with my installed drive.
I did this cloning in exactly the same way as before, but the newly cloned drive will not boot when I test it. The BIOS finds the drive OK on boot-up (and doesn't report "missing operating system") but then just hangs on a flashing cursor when normally I'd get the Windows XP splash screen.
The only differences from the successful 80GB to 250GB cloning in what I am now doing that I can see are (i) I am cloning to an exactly same size drive rather than a bigger one and (ii) I am cloning from a drive that itself was cloned.
Can anyone help me with explaining the cause of this problem and what I can do to fix it?
I might add that I emailed Acronis support in late January under the True Image warranty about this problem and they sent me a Case number (00492499) but I have heard nothing more from them.
Chris Phillips

Mon, 02/22/2010 - 01:46
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I don't know the reason for the problem you're having, but a couple of suggestions:
Do what is called a Reverse clone - put the target drive in the position where it will be booting from, and the source drive anywhere else. Then use the bootable Rescue cd to perform the clone.
If that doesn't work, make an Image of the source first then Restore that Image to the second 250. You will need a third drive with enough space to store the Image.

Mon, 02/22/2010 - 02:06