Acronis Clone problems

I have used the Acronis USB “rescue media tool”, many times to clone a customer’s old Hard Disk Drive to a new Solid State Drive (SSD).
Even if the old drive size was larger than the size on the new SSD, Acronis would take care of this mismatch automatically. So long as the used space on the old hard drive was less than the size of the SSD, it would happen seamlessly.
I have had no problems doing this up to now.
This time, with the customer’s old 1TB hard drive and new 240GB SSD, the clone process would hang at the screen where I was asked what type of clone process that I would like to do. I always choose to make the cloned drive bootable. I have learnt that one needs to put the new drive in the computer and then the old drive in a USB caddy. I have discovered that trying to clone from the old drive in the laptop to the new drive in the USB caddy, would cause the new drive not to be able to boot for some reason.
I tried multiple times but it still stalled. After leaving it overnight thinking that the process was going very slowly due to the old hard drive having a problem, I awoke to the same screen.
Eventually the only way to get the clone process proceeding was to shrink the size of the Windows partition on the old hard drive from 1TB to 120GB.
Once I did that Acronis started the clone process like I am used to.
I used the Windows “Shrink Volume” tool in the Disk Management module to accomplish this.