Cloning of Entire drive including "Unallocated" partition and data within.

I have a 500GB external USB drive in which someone recently performed an accidental deletion of a partition (460 GB) and creation of a new partition (32GB) occur on a hard drive. So, I am going to attempt data recovery of files using various data and partition recovery tools.
However, I first want to use Acronis True Image to make a complete clone of the drive to another blank hard drive and work off the copy as I try different data recovery software packages to see what works best.

So, using Acronis True Image 2014 and first made a backup of the disk with the option of doing a sector by sector backup including unused sectors. So, it appeared to do this backup successfully since the backup size is over 400GB which thus includes the now 400+GB unallocated partiion.

But, when I go to restore this backup to a new blank 500GB drive, it doesn't restore the data of the unallocated partition. I can see this based on the fact that it does the restore in about 2 minutes and if I try and use a raw data viewer utility on the hard drive, all of the data in the 400GB unallocated partition shows up as 0x0s, which is not the case on the original drive.

So, I then tried to do a clone right from old drive to new drive instead of creating the interim backup. I told the clone to do a sector by sector clone. And once again, the cloned drive shows the unallocated partition but no data was written in this partiion.

Any suggestions? Is this functionality broken in True Image 2014. Should I try in an older True Image product?

-Jeff