After reading through this old thread, I'm still scratching my head and wondering,,, why would anyone want to Clone a Laptop drive? Backup to an external drive, YES, as a compressed Image File, but clone? Maybe someone doesn't truly understand what clone means. Eh?
As for Acronis True Image, that comes with a Seagate drive or with the download of Seatools, from Seagate, as was plainly stated, the program has been tweaked to only work if it sees a Seagate drive in the system. It's been like that for a long time.
When Maxtor was still making drives, the Acronis that came on the Maxblast disk with a new Maxtor drive, would only work if the program saw a Maxtor drive, somewhere in the system. That made it pretty Undesirable for anyone working on many different brands of HD's and computers. It wasn't TECH Friendly!
I got my first copy of Ghost 2002 backup software as a gift, on a drivers disk that came with a motherboard.
It was not motherboard or disk drive sensitive and would work equally well on all systems. Ghost is actually far superior to other backup software.