Hard Drive Not Showing Up on Master Boot Drive After Restoring Successfully

[Casey2016]

I have a Toshiba Windows Vista 32 bit laptop computer and I want to upgrade the hard drive to a Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate. I have not yet decided which one of the three yet. But, before doing this, I used Macrium Reflect to backup Vista then connected a hard drive to my notebook with a USB cable and restored the backup file to it. Then I rebooted the notebook and pressed the F12 key to go to the Boot Device Menu. The option to boot from the hard drive where I restored Windows was not available. I had to install the hard drive inside my notebook then restore the backup image file to the hard drive. Can you tell me why the hard drive was not shown on the Boot Device Menu and what I need to do to make it available?
Thanks for your help.
Casey2016

 

[hang-the-9]

If you could not boot from the external hard-drive, you did not make that drive bootable. Run the Macrium program and use the make boot disk option to create a bootable drive. It will format it, so make sure whatever is on that drive has a backup somewhere.

 

[Casey2016]

If you could not boot from the external hard-drive, you did not make that drive bootable. Run the Macrium program and use the make boot disk option to create a bootable drive. It will format it, so make sure whatever is on that drive has a backup somewhere.

 

[Casey2016]

Thank you so much hang-the-9!
I used Macrium 's option to create a bootable drive and was successful. I also did an intelligent backup first.
I discovered that in order to redeploy successfully, the dongle needed to be updated. No one told me this, I happened to "stumble" upon it by accident as I was trying to complete the redeploy after numerous attempts.