New HD wont boot after WD Lifeguard copy from old HD

I got a laptop (HP Compaq nc8430) that I need to upgrade the hard drive on.
Installing clean on the new HD and copying everything needed from the old HD is not really an option.
This is what I've done:
Took a new WD 320GB Sata 2.5" and hooked it up using USB equipment.
Ran WD Lifeguard setup utility and chose "add the drive as the new boot device". It ran for 3hrs and when it was done the new HD looked identical to the old one, partitions and everything, except more free space. The only difference I can see is the drive label. Old HD has "Local disk", the new has "DRV4_VOL1".
I shutdown, removed the old HD, put in the new one in and tried to boot. No luck.
What happens when I boot is that the comp finishes POST (I belive) and then does not proceed from there. The screen goes black, except a DOS marker blinking in the top left corner. No error messages at all.
After playing around a bit, this is what I got:
- When booting from UBCD (ultimate boot cd 4 win), everything is normal. It detects the drive, the partitions, and the files, correct HD size, nothing out of the ordinary.
- When I boot from a windows CD I get an error message saying "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer."
- When I put in the old HD and use WD Lifeguard to check "Hard Drive information"->"MBR Table" on the new HD, everything is identical to the old HD, except size:
Partition1: Type-NTFS, Bootable-yes, Begin CHS-N/A, End CHS-N/A
Partition2: Type-FAT32, Bootable-no, Begin CHS-N/A, End CHS-N/A

Could this be the cause of an outdated bios?

 

Alright, so I put the new HD in another computer to see if it would attempt to boot, and it did!
It crashed as soon as it began loading drivers, but that's to be expected.

Since another computer attempts to boot from the new HD, but this computer does not, I have a feeling the problem is related to the bios.
Got any idea which settings could cause this or whether a bios upgrade is needed?
The comp is not that old, only 1-1.5 years, so I wouldnt really expect it to have trouble using new HD's, but I dont see many other options here...

 

I fixed the problem.
For future refrence, this is what I did:
Upgraded the bios, this gave me a couple of new configuration options.
One of them was "HDD Translation Mode". This one was set to "Bit-shift" and had to be changed to "LBA-assisted".

 

Thanks for letting us know.

I had thought that the correct procedure for cloning a HD was to put the new drive in the master position and the old one in the slave position and then copy info over.

I wonder if the Western Digital tools could have set up your new drive if you had done it in this order? Or maybe the laptop would not have recognized it?

I'm glad you figured it out as it looks like it truly was a BIOS problem--I would have thought it was something in the boot sector settings.