Acer 532h SSD Install Problem!

OK, let me first begin by saying I am completely new to this forum, but i did search around a bit, and did not find anything pertaining exactly to what I have going on.
I have an AO532h that i am trying to get an SSD installed properly. The HDD that came with it is completely fine, but I do not have any data transfer cables to go directly between the two. I have created a windows 7 backup image of the original HDD, and have it on 3 different items to try and install the image onto the SSD. I have a bootable thumb drive with Windows 7 x86(32 bit) on there. all 3 items needed, the boot, sources, and bootmgr. I have one backup image on an external HDD - the one im trying to recover from, but no matter what, I can not get the windows recovery agent to see the HDD/Backup Image i have on there. so i tried putting the backup image on a shared folder on my network, and still no luck. I have no idea what I am doing wrong, at least not from what i can gather from doing countless google/forum searches. any help would be greatly appreciated. TY in advance.