Migrate Easy aborts upon drive error (PC goes to sleep)?

In the past few weeks my windows vista boot drive started to make loud clicking sound once in a while. I figure it may not have long to live, so I want to clone it to another drive.
The boot drive is 250GB but only 150GB is in use. I have a spare 200GB drive so I use that as the destination drive.
I downloaded a trial of acronis migrate easy and everything runs fine initially. It reboots into text mode and shows the copy progress. When it reaches about 38%, the C drive makes a clicking sound, the screen turns blank and the PC goes to sleep mode (the power LED blinks). If I press the power button to restart the PC, the disk activity light flashes but there is no display. If I turn off power and turn it on again, acronis says "completed" and boots into windows again. There is nothing on the destination drive, not even a valid partition.
Just to make sure the PC is not really going to sleep, during the copy process I press the shift key and wiggle the mouse every few minutes but that didn't help.
BTW, I tried the seagate discWizard (looks like a rebranded version of Migrate Easy) with the exact same result.
Any idea how to proceed?
On a clear disk you can seek forever