Cloning problems?

Budman

I put the Bad in Bad Grandpa!
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May 6, 2000
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I posted this in the General Mayhem section but thought I might get a faster response if I post it here.

I'm trying to clone a HP factory spinner 1TB hard-drive running Win 10 home over to a new Crucial MX500 500GB SSD drive using the Acronis software supplied with the new drive. This laptop has 700GB free so I know everything will fit on the new smaller drive.
When I try to copy this drive Acronis puts up the following warning:

The selected disk will be restored as is (Disk layout will remain GPT).
After operation completion, operating systems will not boot from the destination disk in BIOS.

What does this mean and how do I get around it? I've done other swaps on Dell's and HP and have never ran into this problem untill now.

It's an older laptop HP Pavilion model# 17-e119wm. I'm upping the memory to 16 gig and installing this SSD drive so they can get another year or so out of it. Any suggestion will be appreciated.

I just downloaded and installed Macrium. It tells me that I have insufficient disk space? I think it is confused since the original source disk is a 1TB and the selected disk in only 500GB. Even through this is only 200GB used on this 1TB disk. It wouldn't let me proceed any further.

I'm trying to clone both disks on the old PC that my grand kids use when they visit. I always use this old PC when I clone disk as it makes it so much easier.

Attached is a screenshot showing these drives. The middle drive is the one I'm trying to clone to the empty drive on the bottom. I don't understand what are all these partitions on the original 1TB drive? I understand the Windows and the recovery partitions but what are the others for and do I need them?

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I believe that you need to shrink the Partition on the 1TB drive to less that 500GB. I'm sure others will be by to offer further, in depth, instructions, but this will give you a "bump".
 
Macrium should be able to clone the disk to a smaller one. Could you provide screenshots of the steps you're trying to do and the resulting errors?
 
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I use Macrium and agree with Meeho that Macrium should be able to do this.

Cloning, though, means just that: if the first disk has more allocated space than the new disk, it will not work. AIUI. Others are far more knowledgeable about this than I am. I would refer you to the extensive Macrium faq and forum.

My first thought would be to shrink the spinner to ~400Gb and then clone it. Next, you’ll be able to expand the ssd from 400Gb (the size of the original after shrinking), back up to its full 500Gb.
 
Thanks for all the help guys but here is what I ended up doing. I went ahead and used Acronis to clone. I still got the errors but when I put the SSD drive in the laptop it booted right up.

From what I can tell everything got cloned except the recovery partition. All programs and shortcuts seem to be working and laptop is way faster then before.

I'm not worried about the recovery partition as this laptop came with Win 8.1.

It was odd that Macrium couldn't do a clone on this drive. It must be something about those 4 other partitions on the original drive confusing both cloning programs.
 
Glad you got it sorted. Thanks for the update.

(Agreed: odd about Macrium.)
 
If I remember right, Macrium prefers that you make an image file first of the source drive and then take the image and put it on the smaller destination drive. Then it will let you shrink the partition in the imaging process on the destination drive (ie your 500gb ssd).
 
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