[lug] So much SATA expertise -- cloning?

[Dru Whitledge]

It the face of so much SATA expertise -- I'm too tempted not to ask 
-- are there any inherent obstacles to cloning SATA to SATA disk 
drives? I routinely clone my old IDEs with no problem, but a friends 
laptop HDD is threateningly to fail and I offered to clone it -- with 
I did without a hitch -- to an old 80 gb IDE laptopo drive. I when I 
went to install the clone I discovered her laptop HDD is an 80 gb 
SATA, so I wipped out a 160 gb SATA to clone it -- but it failed -- 
several times. Since it's threatening to fail -- I wanted to capture 
the drive image on another drive (and free up my little IDE laptop 
drive) so I attempted to clone to an old 80 gb SATA desktop drive -- 
that failed too. BUT a second attempt to capture the image on an old 
40 gb 3.5 IDE drive -- succeeded.

Hence my question -- is there some inherent obstacle to overcome to 
clone SATA to SATA that doesn't exist cloning SATA to IDE or IDE to IDE.

Dru