I'm trying to upgrade a user's machine to some better hardware. I know of Easy Transfer, but I'd rather not have to reinstall all the programs that are already present. (Some of which are no longer available, anyway). Instead, I'm trying to transfer the entire disk image from one machine to the other, but I ran into issues.

If I copy the partition image over to the new machine using Clonezilla, I get errors on boot saying that I need to insert the Vista install disk and run repair. I do that, but it then says that it is unable to repair whatever it is that's broken.

Next, I tried to sysprep the old machine before creating the image, but sysprep fails saying that it encountered some sort of system error. Should it be possible to sysprep any arbitrary machine, or does it only work on a relatively clean install?

Could it be a missing driver that is tripping me up? The new machine is a fairly stock desktop that shouldn't need any special drivers beyond what's already present in standard Vista.

Are there any foolproof methods for doing this sort of thing?