Concerning Acronis Question..
for some reason I could not reply to your comment.. I guess that post was getting too long..
Anyway, I use Acronis and yes, restoring to another drive is quite simple, you just need to make sure you also select MBR during restore (it automatically saves the MBR during a Disk/Partition Backup). I don't use SecureZone or whatever it is called as I don't choose to consume disk space for it. The boot disc gets me by just fine.