Disk cloning giving me trouble

Hello all. I just purchased Acronis 9 and dl'd the update from their website. My hdd is failing and I'm trying to clone it to a new one I just bought. I'm cloning a 250gb to a 120gb, so what I've done is hook up the 120 as a slave, booted from the Acronis disc, and used their "clone disk" option with partitions done automatically AND manually (neither have worked so far) and set to clone proportionally to the new hdd. All I get is my recovery partition, then Acronis says "15 hours remaining," which never changes (after an 8 hour wait) . When I boot up from the master I can see that the slave has the recovery partition and the rest is unallocated. What am I doing wrong? I know the drive is bad, but I am using it RIGHT NOW to run everything, and its fine. Basically, its just getting very slow and only reads sporadically (hard to explain), but I mean, I can even run games and stuff from it with no problems. Basically startup and shut down take a long time, but it still works, so why shouldn't Acronis clone it OK? If anyone has some ideas, please let me know. I really appreciate any help. Thanks a lot.
Hamm

 

reading through some other posts, I have another question. I was told by some coworkers that Acronis would clone the entire disk, but warn me about corrupted sectors so that I could skip them... is this not true?

 

Is the used space on the 250 less than 120 gb?

 

yeah much...its all programs. I have used about 30-40gb. Actually, I used partition magic to delete my old Vista partition that I had forgotten about (I restored XP awhile back and Vista wouldn't boot) and that seems like it may have completely fixed all my problems. I still have to run a diag on the hdd again, but it seems to be working normally. I still want to clone it though, any thoughts on the Acronis problem?

 

Before the 250 gets worse, make the bootable Rescue cd from the menu in the installed True Image software, boot with it and start the Clone function from it. Also if you can get a third hard drive, again with the Rescue cd, make a Backup Image of the 250 on to the third drive. And if the Clone feature still does not work, you can try to Recover that Backup Image on to the 120 gb drive, again using the bootable Rescue CD.