well if that works out then you can clone the drive to your second partition on your windows 7 hdd. but have you tried using different usb ports? also having intel wifi in the machine as well as the bt even though it's off can sometimes cause the issue. are you an latest bios? i think earlt bios also had similar issues. another test is try with the npci=0x2000 flag at chameleon boot and or trying sata mode instead of ahci.