My computer is warning me of an imminent failure of my current hard drive, so I got a new one. Have a 1tb external HDD and first I made a system image, but I couldn't boot my computer with that. Just gave me the Can't Detect Boot Drive error. So then I made it a recovery drive, making sure to copy the recovery partition onto it. Turned off the computer, connected new HDD, and made sure USB drive was plugged in. Set the BIOS to boot USB first, turned on computer. Computer asked me to choose keyboard layout and after choosing US it asked whether I wanted to troubleshoot or turn off pc. Clicked troubleshoot, tried to use Recovery Manager (not sure if that's an HP brand-only feature), I had no options other than Contact HP Support, so I clicked that and I pretty much could only go Back or Finish. So I finished and the pc restarted. Tried doing System Refresh and I can't remember exactly what happened, but I couldn't accomplish anything meaningful with that, nor with any other options. Clicked System Reset, but I didn't want to risk deleting my restore drive. So I turned it off, plugged old HDD drive back in, and here we are. Any advice on how to copy everything onto a new HDD?

From the sound of it, the Recovery Manager you're using is an HP utility.

Was the computer recognizing the external HDD at boot?

Do you have the drive on a USB 3.0 port or a USB 2.0 port? Try booting with the drive connected to a USB 2.0 port if you currently have it on a 3.0 port.

A can't detect boot drive error suggest that the boot flag for the system partition wasn't set on the new drive.

I normally suggest using CloneZilla for imaging, however, imaging can be very drive-intensive, so for a faulty drive, it can easily be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Instead, I suggest backing up all your data ASAP and doing a manual reinstall of Windows onto the new HDD.

A drive image is not a drive, it is an archive, usually compressed, that contains a copy of the files. You need to use the imaging program to make a boot disk to boot the machine, then point to the drive image and then apply that to the new drive.

Pretty sure its usb 2.0.

I might have to try a manual reinstall of win8. The old hdd has probably just about had it.

Thanks. You guys are the best. I'll see what I can come up with.

Using the OS disk, would 'Windows repair' work possibly?

I'd try that before a whole OS install.