Saving and/or Transferring Entire Desktop Panels?

[Moltke]

I don't know what a grub/bootloader is

To my knowledge, the bootloader is a piece of code that runs before any operating system is running, it looks for OSes installed if more than one and offers the user options to select which OS to boot in. When you select a drive just like you did to boot from your USB hdd, the bootloader is the one that handles it. If I'm wrong and/or missed something please someone step in and let us know. 

these notebooks

Oh it is a notebook. Yes, there's no way to unplug internal drives on those ones just in like a desktop, which is what I have.

I've cloned the Windows drive but it refuses to recognize it as a bootable drive

Yeah that won't work, ever! Once Windows is installed in a pc it attaches itself to that hardware, so cloning the drive and trying to get it boot in a different one with different hardware won't work, I don't even think it'd work in two identical pc's with identical hardware, cause Microsoft doesn't think it's profitable for their business that people can simply clone their Windows install which requires to buy a license and install it into another computer without paying more money.