Errors (and solutions) running True Image 10, Western Digital edition

My experience may apply to other editions; here's some free advice, worth every penny:

I bought a new 500GB WD hard drive to upgrade my 250GB system, preparing to upgrade from XP to Windows 7. The new WD drive comes with an OEM copy of True Image. I spent a couple of hours chasing down errors, that probably wouldn't have occurred had I known what I know now:

1) I formatted the new drive with two partitions sized as I wanted them. Don't bother. Format the new drive as a single partition and let True Image format it as it wants. You can resize them later if you want.

2) I used a USB adapter to connect the new drive. When True Image rebooted to process the active partitions, the system tried to boot to the new drive, and couldn't find NTLDR. Once I fixed this and rebooted, True Image thought it was done, but apparently the new drive was screwed up. Be sure to have your BIOS set up such that external drives like this are below the internal drive in the Boot Devices list.

3) I got several errors -- corrupt files, corrupt bitmaps, etc. True Image doesn't tell you which disk threw the error, so assume they're all bad. Most such errors can be fixed with chkdsk, so run chkdsk with the /f parameter against all partitions, new and old, before running True Image.