...having abandoned that fruitless effort.

-IF I had dd'd the C: into a capacious ntfs partition to follow immediately the D: (utility) partition
which I did put first in the recipient disc,
which did clone functionally in that FAT32 pre-formatted partition?

-WOULD that more likely have worked for a good M$ boot?
Since that would have replicated the original order & placement configuration.

There would still have been other stuff in the following partitions.

[I just read your nice reply post more carefully and wondered]