These type of problems are interesting to me. I've seen Tedster around here for maybe 10 years, so I know he's not a newbie to seeing (if not experiencing himself) computer problems.
I had a terrible time, and eventually gave up, on cloning over a Win 8 install to another drive a month or two ago. Re-attempted it last week and did it easy. The problem was I was trying to clone Win 8 from a MBR drive to a GPT drive. That is something I should have figured out from the start.
Also around that time I had a hard time getting Win 8 installed to a drive when other drives were connected to the system. Seems Win 8 is more picky than 7 about that. Or maybe my old motherboard just isn't well liked by 8.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Guess my point is, in my experience with problems like these, it does help to ask. Even if a lot of the answers are things that are obvious things you've already tried. Because, maybe one of those obvious things will be something you overlooked.
A suggestion - just so my post isn't entirely worthless. Switch it from GPT to MBR or MBR to GPT after nuking the partition(s) in Disk Management and see if you can get it installed that way, with it being the only hard drive connected to the motherboard.
cliffordcooley for new drives, or fresh installs on drives without other partitions full of needed data, I try to always go in with unallocated space and let the OS install take care of partitioning (or use its partition manager during the first part of installation)
