Windows 7: Problems cloning W7 to new HD

I have a socket 478 computer (Asus P4C800) running Windows 7 Home Premium. I have 2 harddrives, C is a 74GB WD Raptor and D is a 500 GB WD Black Caviar. I am running out of room on C so I used Acronis True Image 2010 to clone the OS to the D drive. (I've done this procedure many times with other computers w/o problem).

Upon booting to D drive I found that windows updates would not complete nor could I successfully install several applications which would just hang at some point during the install. I finally wiped D drive and did a clean format install of Win 7 32 bit. Same problem. Removed D Drive and substituted a new WD 1.5TB drive and installed Win 7 32 bit. Same problem.

I reinstalled the original C Drive and now all is fine.

I'm thinking it's a driver issue, but I'm mystified as to why I cannot clone or reinstall the OS to another good HD and have it function correctly. This is a 7 year old system and maybe one of the sata ports or other components is going bad?

Have you tried having only Win 7 on our C drive and putting your programs on D? This should give you the extra room and make the system boot OK.

Thanks bigmck for the reply. Yes, that's what I'm going to do, just leave C as the OS and D as an additional storage drive.

After doing some research, I'm thinking it has to do with the Windows Installer Service, which for some reason was not starting. Perhaps something happened during the clone process or when I attempted to do a clean install. I ran tests on all the hard drives and memtest 3.5 on the memory and all seems fine there.
The only other thing I can think of is that I am using a wireless keyboard and mouse on that computer. I have read on other forums where others had problems trying to clone using a wireless combo, but I thought Acronis had fixed that issue.

Problem finally solved. A couple of weeks ago I had replaced the 2 GBs of memory with 4 Patriot 1 GB sticks on the Asus P4C800 Deluxe MB. This was actually causing the problems even though the memory checked out fine and I reseated it several times. I thought my system had been running slower than before and I was right. I replaced the 4 GBs with the original 2 GBs (4 x 512 Samsung) and now the system boots to desktop in 15 seconds from the "starting windows" screen. I was able to clone the C drive successfully this time to a spare drive in case I want to use a larger drive. I had read about others having problems trying to run 4 GBs of memory on this MB, especially with a 32 bit system and single-core cpu. It seems to run fine on 2 GBs so I'll leave it alone.