There's nothing "strange going on". Frankly, your references to "system
restore of my laptop from cd " and using "imb restore & recovery software
to
create a bootable disk of the new hard drive", etc., are just muddying the
waters. This is *not* complicated business. The cloning process, as I've
said, is uncomplicated and relatively simple to undertake. Give it one
more
try.

Nothing strange? Did you ever hear about IBM HPA?