External drive doesn't show volume when used internally (and vv)

I have an early 2011 MBP 17" where I have replaced the optical drive with the 750G hard drive that came with the computer. in the hard drive spot I put in an SSD. Recently I got a 1T 2.5" drive and I want to copy all the files from the internal 750G to the 1T and then put the 1T in the optical drive bay to replace the 750G.
I got everything copied to the 1T drive via USB - i put the drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure that I've used before with this machine. everything copied fine. so i swapped out the 750G for the 1T in the laptop. when I booted up, the drive did now show in the finder. in Disk Utility it shows up as a device and the indented volume is a greyed out and showing a system volume designation (something like disk3d or whatever the OS uses for this [I didn't make note of the specific volume name]). when I put the disk back in the USB enclosure, it worked fine.
So i formatted the 1T in the macbook, interally, and it works fine that way. but when I put the 750G in the external enclosure, thinking I could copy the files that way [external to internal]) - the 750G does the same thing: the device shows up ok in Disk Utility but the volume is grey and shows as an OS volume name. like the 1T I am not able to mount it or do anything other than format it.
So I am at a loss. why can I not copy files to an external drive and put that in the machine internally? this is the way I've done this kind of thing over the years. this is the first time I am doing this with the MBP. what can I do in order to get this to work so I can get all the files on the 750G onto the 1T and work in my MBP?
I know I can leave the 750G in the computer, connect a drive and copy it all over to it. then put the 1T in the computer and copy all the files off the external drive to the 1T. likely this would work. however a) i don't have a large enough external drive to do this with and b) i'd like to understand what is going on here and solve it as i may need to do this in the future.
any ideas?
thanks!

How did you backup your internal hard drive to the external? In order to boot a Macintosh has to be partitioned using the GUID scheme and then formatted as Mac OS extended Journaled. Both operations are performed in Disk Utility. You can clone your drive to to the external using a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. I'm not sure what you expect to accomplish without install discs. When you clone a drive you're making an exact copy. You shoud probably look at calling Apple and requesting a set of original discs or purchase a full install of Snow Leopard at http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard

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