Resized NTFS Win XP Part - now no boot

Hi All
I just found the excellent gparted live CD.  Occassionally, I have cause to clone a smaller Win XP installation to a larger HDD, AND the clone has to take into account one of those poxy EISA HP / Compaq / Acer recovery partitions.  Now, all I want to do is this:
1) Clone Win XP partition to new hdd
2) NOT transfer the useless EISA partition
3) Resize the transferred XP partition to max size of new hdd

Unfortunately, the cloning programs I have used (DriveWizard Professional and DriveClone) will only transfer the ENTIRE contents of the old hard drive to the new, keeping the old hdd size as well.   If I try to copy just the XP partition, something goes wrong and I just get jibberish (probably something crappy HP has done that I can't figure out).  So, I'm left with an 80GB hdd that on has 40gb used (losing 9GB to the crappy EISA part) and 40gb unallocated.  So, using Cute Partition Manager 0.9.8, I delete the EISA partition, reboot, do fixboot and fixmbr, and the machine boots ok.  Next, I try growing the NTFS part from 37GB to 67GB (approx) using gparted live cd.  The procedure seems to work, but when I reboot the PC just sits there with a blank screen and a cursor about 2 lines down from top.  So, I boot onto XP cd, go to recovery console and do fixmbr and fixboot.  Seems to work, but reboot produces same blank screen result.  Fine (not).  So, I reboot and try chkdsk - message comes back saying there are unrecoverable errors after only 1 or 2 secs.  Great (not).  Reboot again and try to a repair install of XP.  After a quick delete of system files, it slowly copies new files onto hdd (slower than normal) then reboots.  However, same prob again - blank screen.  It's weird that I can see the XP part and even do a fixboot rebuild, but it still won't boot.  Even the fact that the XP boot cd can see a C:\windows directory and allow me to attempt a repair install is puzzling.

Now you may ask why I am bothering.  Two reasons: 1) Because I want to learn how to do this (I find a need for it approx 5-6 times a year).  2) Because the people I am trying to do it for really don't want the hassle of trying to reinstall everything back to the way it was before upgrading their hdd.  No, they don't want to just bung in another drive, as usually these people are coming from older ATA systems thru to SATA systems, and, despite the trouble I'm having making it work, it WOULD be easier if I could find a way to make it so! (Plus it would be great to find a reliable way to get rid of those sodding and very useless EISA parts that Acer and HP love so very much).

Lastly, I rebooted a couple of hours back any tried moving the now 67GB part back to the 8MB mark (as I wasn't sure if the info being displayed by gparted took into account the invisible 8MB XP partition that exists) - taking away the now-unused 9GB recovery EISA part - and growing the part up to the full 74GB (approx).  It's going to take a total of 3.5 hours!  That doesn't seem right.  The real prob is that I am supposed to have all this done and squared away by 10am tomorrow (it's 9:52pm now), and I still have a bunch of stuff to do on the hdd before it goes back to its owner (updating flash, acrobat, k-lite codec etc etc).

HELP please!
Cheers
Peter