I'm not sure what's happening for you. I've used the Seagate cloning tool with good results several times, but one thing I do is use a host computer to work with the drives involved. That is, I remove the drive from the computer and connect it to the computer with the Seagate tool. I've never tried using that type of tool on the system that I'm trying to clone. I looked into upgrading to the full Acronis package, but backed away at the time because of it being tied to one computer. It wasn't going to be a viable backup solution due to the number of computers I was looking at.

On the Dell question, I just rebuilt a Dell computer, but it already had the install disks which came with the system. I think we paid extra to get the disks up front (at least I know we paid extra to get both XP and Win7 disks). The only difference I could see in the Windows 7 install disk from the normal MS OS install disk was that I didn't have to enter the license key. I don't believe it created any sort of hidden partition either. Once the OS was installed, I loaded a second driver disk to enable various hardware features (eg network drivers). It was no different than I've had to do with any other motherboard driver disk.

There really was not the typical trial software etc loaded. I did install a few Dell utilities. On purpose. One of which was a system checking utility which warned me of an error on the brand new Seagate drive I had just put in. I should have listened to it. Less than 12 hours later, the drive failed. It ran maybe 24 hours total. I had planned on cloning that drive the following weekend. I ended up starting over completely with another drive. No data loss though as everything was on the original drive I was replacing.

Back to your problem. I'd be looking at changing some variables. Maybe the data cable, or plug into a different SATA port. If you have an option, try a different host computer.