Thanks for the help!
Update:
The system lives (mostly)! The original disk was a 160GB, the new SSD is a 120 and this was not a problem.
The problem was that the boot partition on the old disk was going bad and we had no optical media. Linux clone software bombed out when it hit the bad spot. Acronis coped the bad partition but it slowed to a crawl at around the 33% mark and eventually popped up with an error. Acronis allowed me to ignore the errors but it took about 30 times longer to go the 2% from 33% to 35% (the bad spot) as it took to clone the entire rest of the drive. Acronis goofed up the diag partition so I had to go back to Linux to re-copy that partition. In all there were 3 partitions to copy, 2x diag and the main windows/boot partition.
Shrinking everything to fit was trivial with the disk out of the system. It is very hard to shrink a disk while it is running, Windows will complain about unmovable areas. Both Linux and Acronis had methods of shrinking the copy to fit on the 120. It was no problem at all.
I checked the boot partition for 4k alignment and it is fine! I guess the 4k alignment on the other 2 diag partitions doesn't really matter?
So after 7 hours of fighting with this thing I did a restore back to factory defaults and the entire Windows load went fine but in a 2nd step the Acer bloatware stopped at 8/9 and did not finish even overnight. To get the system functional I had to do Selective Startup and disable the bloatware installer.
Anyhow the system seems to be working fine but I guess there is no telling exactly which 2% of the original data has been lost...
Facebook
Twitter