[George]

Cloning does not require a clean drive, it replaces the data in it's entirety, so I don't understand the question. Forget I posted.

We beat this subject to death on another thread and there's no point in going over that ground all over again.

The last I knew it was decided one could not boot to a USB drive, which made cloning not as attractive as imaging regarding laptops if there were a drive failure.

I'll let someone more qualified to address the problem.