Sorry for the delayed reply. The problem was, indeed, solved by Acronis tech support. The solution: Boot up with a CD that has the Acronis program on it. When booting up, hit the F12 key. The bootable disk can be made from the Acronis program itself (be sure to include the entire program on the disk that you burn). This works like a charm. It have used it multiple times to clone my entire disk to another internal HD as well as to an external HD.  I was EXTREMELY SATISFIED with the short response time and good advice from Acronis tech. They wanted to be absolutely certain that my problem was solved before they "closed the case". [I have upgraded to Acronis True Image Home 2010 as I migrate to Windows 7 - I found the best price on Amazon!]
Description: A newly acquired WD 1TB External HD was installed without problems. A screen shot of my existing drives is shown below. I used the latest edition of Acronis True Image Home 2009 to clone drive 0 onto drive 1 (the new drive). Each time the procedure ended in a crashed computer. My Dell Studio 1537 could only be restored by removing the battery and restarting. At that point, the new drive contained the small Dell FAT-32 sector, plus drive (D:) (RECOVERY). It did NOT contain a clone of partition (C:)OS. The screen shot shows there is now a “crash dump” on drive 0, but I cannot find it. Acronis logs (see below) indicates my attempts at cloning were successful. The Acronis Backup function works fine to just backup partition (C:) OS. Is the problem with the Acronis software or with Vista OS. I appreciate your input. Thank you.   [IMAGE]   Acronis log 1           Acronis log 2           
Studio 1537 running Vista Home Premium crashes during attempted disk clone 
procedure