I assume that you followed the steps in the Workstation documentation to assign the physical disk to the VM.

Some thoughts that I have.

What you're trying to do is the equivalent of moving an existing Windows installation to dissimilar hardware. There are many things that you have to know in order to get it to work and it's not as easy as you think it is.

What firmware type did you choose for your VM? BIOS or UEFI. That has to match how your old PC was configured.

What kind of bus was that drive connected to in your old laptop? That has to match as well for the virtual machine's virtual disk bus type. If it was connected via a SATA disk and you configure your virtual disk as a SCSI virtual disk type, that's not going to work. Windows-isms are at play here because the Windows boot process is configured for the type of bus that was present in your original PC. 

You also have the issue of drivers for hardware that was present on your PC but not present in your VM. You may need to go to safe mode and remove drivers for that PC hardware.