Hard drive copy won't boot

The problem: the replacement hard drive on my 2.4 GHz 17" Macbook Pro won't boot.
The story: After the original hard drive on my macbook died, I managed to get a complete copy of the files that were on it, and a new 500 GB drive. I'd previously made a bootable copy of my drive on an exterior using SuperDuper, which also has a few older Time Machine backups. So, I put a disk image of my original drive on the exterior, booted from the copy, and used Disk Utility's restore to copy all the files onto the new drive. Unfortunately, this didn't quite work: although my macbook recognizes the copy as a bootable drive, both in Startup Disks and when holding option at startup, when I actually try to boot into it I just get an endlessly spinning little wheel. The drive passes the Disk Utility verification, and although I had to repair about a million permissions it now passes that test too.
The sensible thing to do now would be to reinstall the OS from install disks and restore, I know, but unfortunately I'm in a different country than my install disks and it would require time and effort to get a set that I'd rather avoid, if possible. So, does anyone have a suggestion for something I could try using what I have now?

Thank you both for your suggestions! Alas, I seem to be back where I started. I recopied the hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and it seemed to transfer fine, but once again the system recognizes the drive but hangs when I actually try to boot into it. I'm repairing all permissions right now, which apparently didn't transfer correctly, but as that didn't help last time I don't hold much hope that this will be different. Is there anything else I can do?

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