Cloning a Windows 7 hard drive

Recently when cloning a hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it, we ran into some problems. We first attempted to use Windows' backup tools; this was unsuccessful as Windows refused to restore the image to the new drive. We then attempted to use Ghost 11.5 (we didn't have the latest version handy). Though it appeared to be successful, the computer would not boot afterward and simply displayed a black screen after POST. We attempted to use CloneZilla which was not successful because the destination drive was slightly smaller than the source drive. When we attempted to shrink the partition, Windows informed us we could not do this because there were several unmoveable files near the end of the drive. What finally worked was a clean install of Windows 7 on the destination hard drive, then Ghosting the data partition from the source drive to the destination drive.