Cloned HDD to SSD won't boot on USB

Hi everyone,
I am not including the build right now because I don't have access to the computer. But it is windows 10, maybe a few updates behind.


I am upgrading a 10 year old Lenovo G580 laptop with an SSD. I cloned the original disk onto the SSD via USB cable, that seemed to work.

I wanted to test it out by booting from USB before opening the laptop and switching out the drives, but even with my boot order and all settings in BIOS correct, I think, I was getting just the Lenovo screen over and over, and eventually the new SSD did seem to mount, but opens Recovery Environment.

The weird thing, when I plug the SSD into a another, newer computer via USB, it boots from the USB just fine, works like an exactly it should, looks exactly like the old system.

So I'm afraid to do any recover mode stuff. I don't understand why it booted just fine via USB to my new computer, but is not working well with the old one. I did make a system restore point but it says I can't use it because there are two versions of windows that are indistinguishable.

I would just do recovery environment stuff, but that could delete some of my data and applications, and the whole point is to keep all that as it was. I can easily backup the most important data before diving in but would really like to not have to do that.

Thanks for any help you can give,

It had some updates maybe last year. I'm letting it run more updates now.

I also tried my SSD on a newer computer to boot via USB. Windows loaded with all my old settings,no problem.

But when I went back to my original machine it stopped working again.
I do want to test it on USB before going in and swapping the drives.