Clone disk hangs before allowing selection of destination disk

I've seen multiple reports of this problem where after selecting a source disk the small window with a spinning clock appears and the process never progresses from there. The earliest I've seen was from 2014, but I havent tried to establish the original timing of this issue.

Its August 2019 and I still have the same issue.

I have an older Acer laptop (manufactured in 2012) with spinner 500gb disk. I bought a Crucial MX500 SSD and plugged it into the second bay available on this laptop (direct SATA connection).

Downloaded the latest Acronis for Crucial and created a rescue Linux media. After booting into the media I get UI menu and select Tools/Clone. 

The initial menu where one selects Destination shows only the original spinner disk and the USB boot stick. I pick the Seagate disk and click next. A small pop-up window appears with spinning clock and thats the end of it.

I tried 32Bit and 64Bit versions of clone. I confirmed in the BIOS the SSD is visible.  I switched to the shell from UI (ctlr-alt-f1) and with lsblk and dmesg confirmed that underlying OS that Acronis uses sees both disks.

I tried to run the report option from UI menu - it just taking forever and and I decided not to wait....

In the end I booted into Ubuntu USB and used ddrescue to clone my disk without issues.