I have a number of HDD drive "shoe boxes" -- not that large but the name works for me -- that I connect using USB. Sometimes the disk utilities treat these drives without distinction from the bus-connected, built-in HDD hardware. Other times, the utilities stumble.

One such stumble seems to be clonezilla but it might be the loose nut in the end-user chair.

To replace a laptop drive, my procedure typically follows this pattern:

1. purchase the replacement drive
2. install to a shoe-box enclosure
3. connect the shoe-box using USB
4. boot clonezilla
5. clone (drive-to-drive) the existing laptop HDD to the shoe-box
   (The laptop is dual boot Ubuntu and win-dose-XP.)
6. inspect that the shoe-box looks okay
7. swap the HDD between internal and shoe-box
8. boot the new drive and complete the copy verification
9. connect the original HDD (now shoe-box mounted) as needed for archive and other follow-up work.

I keep the original laptop HDD as a warm spare until I'm certain that I'm happy with the new drive. At that point, I'll create an optical media archive of the original HDD and recycle that HDD.

What's the problem? Frequently, the new HDD fails to boot when moved into the laptop. It works often enough that I think my process is sound, and suspect that something else (insert loose end-user nut here) is the cause of troubles.

I most often use the NexStar family of drive enclosures -- both 2-inch and 3.5-inch. I've not been systematic about recording which shoe-box or cable set works vs. fails. (Like I said, "loose nut.")

Thanks in advance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

Do you umount (or shutdown) prior to removing the drive ?.