A:In my original post I stated I used clonezilla. Obviously not while windows was mounted. This was done with a live "cd".
A:Really not sure why you are assuming that my hard drive had multiple partitions.
1) OK, GOOD. that was the best way to do it, but Clonezilla may not have been a good program to use. Some Partition managers are pretty good, others have problems. Ie, "Partition Magic" - That was a really bad program - I do not know what they evolved into, but they are to be avoided. The one that has worked pretty flawlessly for me for years is Paragon Partition manager, but I use a very old Recovery CD- Because they discontinued that program and made something else. With too much extra stuff, I just need a simple partition manager. Acronis used to be good, when it was called Disk Director, but then again, they changed the software and now it is not as good as it once was.
2) Because all new OEM computers have them, and not being sure what category your machine was: Self Made or Bought from a Store and Branded, all Branded Laptops and PC have at least 4 partitions on one HD. I always assume, in these forums, they had multiple partitions, because this is usually the case.
If you only had the one partition and resized it, there should not have been any problems. But maybe something happened during the process, I wold do it again, because I HAVE had perfectly copied partitions - I thought - Do what you are experiencing now. But I copied them again with a different program, and then they worked.
The drive will fail loading at the Aperture Circle because it is hung up finding the folder with the Boot Manager in it, Maybe the original drive had the boot manager on a small 100 mb partition. I don't know but I have seen that- Left over from the 4 partitions I was referring to, when they removed their recovery partitions, the OS still needed the bootloader on the small partition. Removing the small partition was a sure way to brick the PC. And my Media PC is like that, even though it is 8, because I have Windows 7 installed on the original boot volume and the Windows 8 Boot GUI went onto THAT hard drive- So the system bots from the Windows 7 partition, even though I never use it, thats how Windows 8 set itself up.
You may or may not have and any of these or related issues when you first cloned the driver over, maybe the Original OS was on an HDD with the 4 partitions. I dont know but if the original Drive still has the OS on it, I'd just copy it again.
Also, a SanDisk drive, maybe it is just a glitch. I used to use a handful of SanDisk Flash Drives which all failed within months of purchase.
If they (SanDisk) have any SSD Drive scanning tools, I would use those to optimise the drive, or use what is in Windows 8 - Just set it on a daily Optimization routine, it may take 1 or 2 days, But it is acting like it is fragmented, so whatever you can do to clean it up, do that.