Trouble booting cloned (vista) drive

Hello All,
Ok here is the problem, I have a machine here where the HD has a couple of pending sectors. It still boots fine, no data has been lost, regular backups are being kept. I am trying to clone the original HD to another HD using clonezilla (all other cloning software choke and never complete). Clonezilla does, HOWEVER the new drive is not bootable. When I try I am told that there was a problem and into insert my vista disk to fix the problem. Well that is fine IF you have a vista disk. This is a HP machine which as you probably know, they only give you a "recovery" partition/disk which wipes the drive and restores it back to when you bought the machine. They don't give you any Microsoft start up tools other then reverting to a restore point. The guy does not want to wipe and rebuild everything, just clone it over to a new drive which I have done but it won't boot.

A Vista recovery disk would work, but the only one I found is by Neosmart and they want $25 for it. While that is better than buying a copy of Vista, it seems like I should be able to do repair the startup data in another fashion. Would a windows 7 disk work? I am assuming not, and would cause more problems. I have seen tools to create a recovery disk, but again it requires having a Vista disk in the first place (which if you already have a Vista disk, why would you need to build a emergency recovery disk that does the same thing?)

One other thing I thought of: EasyBCD and using that to copy the boot manager info from the original drive to the clone. Although it is strange that Clonezilla wouldn't have copied that in the first place?

Any thoughts?

 

Well I know Vista and 7 use similar boot systems, but I wasn't sure if they were THAT compatible. And this seems to be a common problem with cloning a windows HD to another (with vista and 7 anyway not sure about XP) with clonezilla. In all reports I have read, the install/fix startup problems option from the install CD or recovery CD fixed it.