The currently restored XP system was "Recovered" as the whole drive (3 partitions) to an empty but much larger hard disk, equivalent to a clone. Partition sizes were set slightly bigger than the originals.
I have not used "Clone" from Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack as it seemed to be the same as System Backup. The method recommended by Acronis for dissimilar hardware at http://kb.acronis.com/content/5410 is to Backup the drive (I did it to a USB disk), then to Recover using "Universal Restore". The result can be viewed in post #23.
If I were to clone with dd, as you recommend, but to dissimilar hardware and a much larger disk, how would you advise me to deal with the partition sizes and the missing drivers etcetera before or when the transferred system boots?
It seems to me that the present situation is not very different to a BSOD STOP message due to many other causes in working Windows XP systems. Do you think further troubleshooting of the STOP message is worthwhile? (I have posted this question to a Windows forum too).
If you do not believe that any of this will work, should this thread be closed?
In any case, thank you all for your comments and generous help!

If you clone a 1st hard disk into a 2nd hard disk you force the second unit to have identical partitions of the 1st.

Every binary bit inside the partitions is a mirror image of the 1st disk and the excess capacity is simply unused in the 2nd disk.

If the 1st disk boots so will be the second unit. There is no possibility to end up anything different unless "dd" fails to work.

In the first boot Xp will know immediately the hard disk serial number is not matched and will demand an immediate reboot. After a reboot it would work perfectly. This is the case if no other hardware is altered for all Xp, Vista and Win7.

In your case lets say the Video and nic are in trouble. What you should end up is no Internet and the display default to the lowest VGA which is supported by all video cards. Your USB ports may not work and there is no sound but that is a different scenerio to BSOD because your XP worked before!

My advice is based on something I have done before. Not what I have seen or heard from.

If you do not have the necessary drivers for the old Xp to work on the new 2nd PC then you are wasting time here.

So you are advocating a clone. Yes, I'll try that. And I hope I am not wasting YOUR time!
But your comments do not offer any help with the current situation, which may arise again after cloning with DD.
You appear to assume that I do not have the drivers for the 2nd PC. I wrote that I obtained all those that I could identify from the motherboard manufacturer's site (MSI) and directed the Recovery program to the USB drive on which they were located, but I do not know if they were installed (post #22).
However, I do know that the transferred system boots in Safe Mode, and that there are no apparent faults in Device Manager except for Audio and VGA display drivers. So with the current method of Recovery, according to what you write, I should I be able to boot normally but have no Internet, audio or super VGA. USB is actually OK (I have updated drivers from there).
If I clone with dd and the currently available drivers, I may get the same result (Safe Mode only). How can I find out if any necessary drivers are missing or not enabled?

I was hoping you can verify the source disk first to make sure it does boot. If there is no way of verification then your copy obtained by the third party software isn't delivering the goal. That would be the end of the line for you.

Safe mode in Windows loads only the basic drivers needed for the GUI - a VGA driver, generic hard drive controller and the TSR programs for keyboard and mouse and a few other things. Network support drivers need to be loaded with 'Safe mode with network support', and the HAL is not updated. Try setting the video mode to generic VGA, remove the sound card driver, and the network card driver on the original system. That MAY help. Another thing to try for migrating to a larger hard drive is Seagate Disc Wizard. Again, unless you are essentially transferring your legal license of Windows XP to a different computer and installing Linux on the original, I do not recommend doing any of this.

No.1. I verified the source backup on a USB HDD with Acronis True Image Home 2010. This was the backup which I used for Acronis Universal Restore and which booted in Safe Mode only, and with normal boot caused error message BAD_POOL_CALLER STOP:0x000000C2(0x00000007,0x00000CD4,0x00720067,0xF7ADA4A8). The last driver displayed as loading before entering Safe Mode was Mup.sys. I did not repeat Universal Restore with this backup.
No.2. Instead, as recommended, I cloned the source (laptop) disk (3 partitions, as with No.1) to a different USB HDD using a Linux boot disk (GParted). I could not verify this cloned image by booting the laptop:I removed the original HDD, changed boot settings in the boot sequence to boot from USB HDD, but it did not boot. I checked that the partitions on the clone as displayed in GParted were identical with the source in size and arrangement, including unallocated space.
No.3. I have now deleted the original Restored system on the desktop HDD (from No.1) and transferred the cloned disk image made with dd (from No.2) to it. This also fails to boot both normally and in Safe Mode. Error message:
0x0000007B(0xF79CB528, 0xC000034, 0x00000000,0x00000000)
No.4. Inspection of partitions with GParted shows they are identical on original laptop HDD, USB HDD, and desktop HDD.
If the clone will not boot I cannot install any needed drivers. This must be the end of the line!
Thank you all again for your patience.

mowley,

I think a lot of effort has been spent fruitlessly due to the fact your backup Xp image could not be verified in its original condition.

If you used a third party software to back up a bootable MS Windows it might be only restorable in the original environment because components that are missing elsewhere may be readily available in the original environment.

Had you dd the image out all the components would be available as you would be creating a 100% clone. The image you have is a clone and not to be restored. It is a 100% replacement.

Standard Xp does not boot from a USB port so the only way to verify your restored copy is put it inside an internal hard disk in exactly the same manner as before.

Agreed on that.

How would you do that with a laptop? I thought it might boot on the laptop as there is the option to boot from many sources in Setup.

The image I have is a 100% clone made with dd. I "restored" it to the desktop hard drive in the same way- with the GParted Linux CD and dd. Wouldn't that be a 100% "replacement", but in a different environment? I was encouraged by your statement that a clone will always boot, but that the system might then shut down asking for Microsoft reactivation.

Mowley,

It looks like we are all forgetting one point. You are trying to boot from a USB hard disk? Umm... two questions here. First, is the USB drive capable of being used as a bootable device? Some USB hard drives are not able to be used as bootable drives, but only as backup devices. The other question is, does your laptop support booting from USB devices? Some BIOS implementations claim to allow USB boot devices, but the implementation is flawed. Try putting a blank hard drive into your laptop so that Windows boot manager can sense a hard disk. Other than that, take the drive out of your USB enclosure and put it into the laptop case. Try having the backup drive PHYSICALLY a part of the laptop. If that works, and you can boot, you may have a better time with the problem. Again, I used Seagate DiscWizard to make an exact copy of my hard drive and migrate it to a larger partition structure, but I booted on the same hardware (the old hard drive is going into my MythTV box for video recordings).

Booting from USB can mean two things.

(1) The hardware supports it (the Bios can be asked to boot a USB device as the first boot disk)

(2) The OS supports it (the operating system has been engineered to be able to boot from a USB device).

Xp does not enterains No. 2 unless it has been hacked or as a special version.

If you have a bootable system and dd it to a clone, the clone will always boot. It never fails even once for me and I had disks full of Oses, sometimes with 63 partitions each housing a different OS.

If you clone a retored disk by dd then it will only be bootable if you "restore" it with the original software and in exactly the same environment. Your restored image might be incomplete and is not the same as a clone. dd in this case only clone another copy of your restored image and not the original "bootable" hard disk.

The right way to do it is have your original disk, or restore the image on it, in a workable and bootable condition. You can dd it to a clone hard disk. That cloned hard disk will be bootable in anther computer. You may have re-action problem if it is a MS Windows but that is specific to the software and got nothing to do with the information faithfully transferred.

Thanks for that clarification. But the BIOS does support boot from USB HDD.I did not "clone a re(s)tored disk by dd". It is not a copy of a backup or of a restored image. I cloned the original (laptop) internal disk to an external USB HDD (not a HDD in an enclosure), and from there copied it with the same software (Gparted) to an internal HDD in a desktop computer.
I could buy a new laptop HDD and dd the clone to it in the same way for testing. But as the laptop is 5 years old, I would rather not do that unless the laptop HDD fails, provided I have (validated) backups or clones always available. But I might have to do that if "validated" means demonstrating that the restored backup/clone will boot in the same machine. At present I take "validated" to mean validated by the third party program immediately after creation of the backup. Is that not reliable?
I think that is exactly what I have done by cloning a bootable disk with dd first to a USB disk, then to an internal HDD on a desktop computer. As it did not work, for whatever reason, I must accept the alternative I outlined above if I want to simply preserve my Windows XP system.

Phantasy Concepts,
The laptop BIOS does allow boot from USB HDD. The system did boot as far as the blue screen!
The USB HDD is not in an enclosure, so I can't do what you suggest.
I could buy a new laptop HDD and dd the clone to it in the same way for testing. But as the laptop is 5 years old, I would rather not do that unless the laptop HDD fails, provided I have (validated) backups or clones always available. But I might have to do that if "validated" means demonstrating that the restored backup/clone will boot in the same machine. At present I take "validated" to mean validated by the third party program immediately after creation of the backup. Is that not reliable?

Lets' take a simple case of a 5 years old laptop disk could be about 80Gb in size and has a disk geometry different to the common LBA disk with 255 head and 63 sectors. The files can be backup onto a different geometry disk. If they are restored the data would return back to the original positions. Therefore a back up copy of the image is not the same as a cloned hard disk that can substitute the original source disk. Only the third party software knows what is exactly being "backup".

If a user permits a Xp to manage the virtual memory then there will be immovable files in the partition. These immovable files are visible every time you defrag the hard disk. Thus to restore a image onto a different hard disk may not work for a Xp unless you are able to specify the files go back to the previous positions. In this respect dd excels because it cannot put the files in any arrangement other than exactly as the original format.

If you have the original hard disk and it boots in the laptop you can clone the 2.5" disk onto a 3.5" desktop size disk and use it on a desktop PC. What you have said is the USB disk is a sealed proprietary unit and so you can only use it as a stepping stone by cloning it as a source into a third internal hard disk. This should work too if you do everything by dd as you would be able to see the disk geometry, size, position and the boundary of every partition remain "unchanged" in all three hard disks.

I have done this with a Vista before within a few days I bought the laptop but in that case the second disk was a 3.5£ USB while the third hard disk was a larger 2,5" size for going back into the same machine. At the time I was proving to myself dd should work for the cloning a Vista from a 500Gb into a 250Gb disk if the original image was smaller than 250Gb. The original disk was 160Gb. It worked because my disk image was 160Gb throughout. dd reported warning in both cloning operations. When a 2.5" 160Gb source was cloned onto a 3.5" 500Gb target disk the warning was the data in the source exhausted and the dd had to stop. In the 3.5" 500Gb source cloning to a 2.5" 250Gb target the warning was dd stopped because this time the target disk was exhausted. In the second cloning I was copying 500Gb hard disk, which has a 160Gb Vista partition and 340Gb of unallocated space onto a 250Gb. After the first 160Gb was done I had to allow dd to write another 90Gb unallocated empty space until it exhausted the available room in the target disk. It is possible to reduced to cloning time by specifying the number of records needed in my case but I was lazy as it is easier and safer to dd the whole disk.

I have migrated this Vista at least 5 times changing it from 160Gb to 500Gb(3.5") 250Gb, then 320Gb, then 500Gb and then lastly to a 128Gb SSD.

Ummm!
Am I missing something here?
As I see it, you can take an image of Windows 98 and stick it in another system and the OS will replace drivers as needed and boot up. Win XP will not let you do that. Win XP WPA (Windows Product Activation), looks at ten particulars, if three or more change, you need to reactivate and possibly shoot the s.it with a MS representative to try a "wiggle around", and get it activated legally.
I've taken similar models of OEM boxes and transfered a legal XP installation from one to the other by playing with certain hardware components and re-activating, in the end, I end up with two legal installations. BITE ME!.
If your desktop does not have the same components as your laptop, your wasting your time.

In my experience, Windows XP requires at least basic boot files on the first primary partition of the system. While it can be 'installed' to other partitions, it will always look for boot data from that first primary partition. I would be suprised if you are able to boot it without moving it to (hd0,0).

Paul.