If anyone can help me with an issue with a cloned drive I would be grateful, been pulling my remaining hair out for days now.

It wont boot into windows (Win XP Pro) at all just sits there with a flashing cursor top left of screen - I really need this for work related stuff
disk image was cloned using Spotmau and restored to a new disk by booting spotmau from usb while the hdd is fitted internally to the laptop.
The laptop is not the original machine the image was taken from as that machine died completely including the original hdd. The laptop is the same make but different model to the original and the HDD is also bigger than the original.
There are 2 partitions on the drive - the Win XP and a smaller Dos partition that I can boot to if I set it as active (by booting into this, it shows that the BIOS does not have a problem with the disk)

The BIOS sees it in the boot list but from a power off state (if I watch the hdd led) it is accessed during POST but it then does nothing, Win XP partition is primary and active. and if I put it into a usb casing I can access all the data just fine but I cant run certain installed programs that I must have (old software no longer available for PLC programming).

Things I have tried are
Windows Recovery Console fixboot and fixmbr
Various MBR utilities from Hirens Boot CD
Removed all passwords

Any ideas anyone ?