In case anyone has tried cloning a Vista partition, for example to upgrade to a larger hard drive, I thought I'd share this with you...

I've been using BartPE on a bootable CD with Norton Ghost v8 to close drives, and was perplexed when a Vista partion cloned successfully, but wouldn't boot.

So... it seems Vista uses a new system:

"Boot Configuration Data (BCD) files provide a store that is used to describe boot applications and boot application settings.
The objects and elements in the store effectively replace Boot.ini"

Anyway, if you can boot the machine to a command prompt with Administrator permissions, you need these three entries - exactly as listed:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

The offending partition will now boot normally!

This will also work if you're brave enough to do this to the partition to be cloned before you clone it... which makes me wonder why the BCD isn't already defaulted to these settings!

Hope this saves someone else a few hours of hair-tearing!!