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Clone to smaller SSD

N

nitz12

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
88
I have a partitioned laptop hard drive I want to move over to an SSD. The current drive is partitioned. I want to clone the 100GB partition (overall drive is 500GB) to a 240GB SSD. Is there a way to do this and what software should I use?

Thanks.
 
Clonezilla says "The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one. ". Does that mean it can take everything from my 100GB partition, which contains Windows and program files, and clone it to a 240GB SSD? Even though the laptop HD is 500GB overall?
 
nitz12 said:
Clonezilla says "The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one. ". Does that mean it can take everything from my 100GB partition, which contains Windows and program files, and clone it to a 240GB SSD? Even though the laptop HD is 500GB overall?
Click to expand...


Save yourself the trouble and just use Macrium Reflect Free through the GUI. Much easier than a more advanced Clonezilla for this type of thing. It pretty much will do all this behind the scenes without ever bugging you during a restore making backing up and restoring a breeze as far as Windows goes.
 
You can do it with Clonezilla, but it's a pain. I had to do it by resizing partitions on the source drive, then copying them over. Found a guide when I googled it. It works, but I found it to be a pain. I think you can also do it using GParted in a similar fashion.

However, maybe I'm wrong and there's an easy way to do it with Clonezilla? Open to being corrected. I really like Clonezilla for general cloning tasks.
 
So, went ahead and "saved myself the trouble and just used Macrium Reflect Free through the GUI". I selected the OS Partition to clone it to the SSD. Cloning performed flawlessly. No issues. Finished in about 1.5 hours. Put the SSD in the laptop - wouldn't boot. Should've known it couldn't possibly be that easy. Says check the cable. Bunch of garbage about PXE, insert boot media, select proper Boot device, press a key, blah blah blah. Tried every suggestion I could find online to get this thing to work, go into BIOS, unhook things, rehook things up. You name it. About to put a gun to my head. What a waste of a day and $120. SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.
 
1.5 hours?
The Paragon software is fast and has always worked for me, well worth the $20.
The first time I used it was when I was installing a 128GB SSD in my 3770K machine.
The drive I was cloning from was a 1TB Black with a 200GB OS partition (80GB used) and a 800GB data storage partition.
All the apps I used gave me the destination is too small problem since they wanted to either clone the entire 1TB drive or the entire 200GB partition.

I bought the app, ran it, it comes up with an interface so that you can deselect files and folders from the source if the destination is too small, did the 80GB clone in about 20 minutes, didn't take long at all.
Rebooted the PC, went into BIOS and selected the SSD as first boot and it booted up really fast with no issues.
Most recent use was last week when I installed a 512GB SSD into my garage PC.
 
So, I have to clone it all over again? Fantastic! That is great news! And spend money? Doubly great! And the hard drive is already polluted with data? Couldn't have asked for a better outcome.
 
What brand is the SSD?

IF it's Samsung they have migration software for this.
I believe other brands do also.

I know Samsung supports going to a smaller drive.
 
Regardless of what you do, taking an image first with Clonezilla would be wise. That way you don't have to worry about screwing up your source.
 
Clonezilla is out. I can't even Run it. Says application was unable to start correctctly (0c0000022). Every time. So is there no real solution? I hate to spend money to find out that something like Paragon doesn't work either, especially now that the new SSD is loaded with files from yesterday's cloning. I really need this to work today.

Someone earlier was shocked the cloning process took 1.5 hours. What should it take? If it goes beyond an hour, should I automatically abort because it must be wrong? I hook up the SSD to a USB 3.0 port but the SATA connector is only 2.6. I'm sure that is slower than
SATA III.
 
Clonezilla is out. I can't even Run it. Says application was unable to start correctctly (0c0000022). Every time. So is there no real solution? I hate to spend money to find out that something like Paragon doesn't work either, especially now that the new SSD is loaded with files from yesterday's cloning. I really need this to work today.

Someone earlier was shocked the cloning process took 1.5 hours. What should it take? If it goes beyond an hour, should I automatically abort because it must be wrong? I hook up the SSD to a USB 3.0 port but the SATA connector is only 2.6. I'm sure that is slower than
SATA III.

Was I supposed to have done something to the new SSD before initiating the clone? And now that is has already been through the cloning process, so I have to erase everything before starting another clone attempt?
 
Very likely you'll need to start over, which will scrap everything you've copied over before. 1.5 hours does sound a bit long to copy everything over, but that depends on how you have things wired. I'd guess 30 minutes might be more what I'd expect.

Try this guide, has only free tools. Worth a shot before you try and spend money on something else.

http://jsm-techblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/using-clonezilla-to-clone-from-larger.html
 
nitz12 said:
Clonezilla is out. I can't even Run it. Says application was unable to start correctctly (0c0000022). Every time. So is there no real solution? I hate to spend money to find out that something like Paragon doesn't work either, especially now that the new SSD is loaded with files from yesterday's cloning. I really need this to work today.

Someone earlier was shocked the cloning process took 1.5 hours. What should it take? If it goes beyond an hour, should I automatically abort because it must be wrong? I hook up the SSD to a USB 3.0 port but the SATA connector is only 2.6. I'm sure that is slower than
SATA III.

Was I supposed to have done something to the new SSD before initiating the clone? And now that is has already been through the cloning process, so I have to erase everything before starting another clone attempt?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you're trying to run Clonezilla from windows.
You should be using the Clonezilla Live bootable.
 
raiderj said:
Very likely you'll need to start over, which will scrap everything you've copied over before. 1.5 hours does sound a bit long to copy everything over, but that depends on how you have things wired. I'd guess 30 minutes might be more what I'd expect.

Try this guide, has only free tools. Worth a shot before you try and spend money on something else.

http://jsm-techblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/using-clonezilla-to-clone-from-larger.html
Click to expand...


Then i would buy the full version. Other than cloning it has very capable backup features as well.
 
i made an ISO image of a 320gb hdd and then put that image on a 40gb SSD with Macrium. was painless. not sure why you have issues.
 
mnewxcv said:
i made an ISO image of a 320gb hdd and then put that image on a 40gb SSD with Macrium. was painless. not sure why you have issues.
Click to expand...


This. I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble. Cloning is one of those things that is difficult the first time, but becomes second nature after that so it's no surprise you're having these issues if it's foreign to you.

I don't see how you could mess Macrium up unless you literally cloned the drive (didn't image it) with both of them plugged in and left them both in the machine plugged in afterwards. Literally is 3 steps:

1) Select Destination (i.e. removable USB drive)
2) Select Source (both partitions)
3) Select Image

To restore you're going to want to put the SSD in the machine by itself and make sure you burn a PXE Boot Disc that can be done within the program. Then boot from that media to do the restore. That's the most pain free error free way of doing it. Also you shouldn't pay for imaging software if you're rarely going to use it. A ton of free programs out there and Macrium is one of the best. I'm thinking your issue there is user error because I almost screwed up my first time too with it.
 
As I stated, the cloning process seemed to run flawlessly. Before I capitulated, I stuck in a Windows 7 64-bit Recovery disk, and whatever it did, the SSD is now working fine. The full volume wasn't showing, so I went into Disk Management and extended the volume and assigned a new drive letter to the remaining unallocated space. All seems to be working now and I did not have to perform cloning again. Thanks.
 
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