Hi all, simple question for the software guru's among us all. I want to clone my windows 7 OS disk entirely from a 500GB drive, to a 300GB drive. Boot sector an' everything. How can I achieve this? The current OS drive only has about 150GB of data on it, so space shouldn't be an issue. Getting it done so far has proven to be a big issue though. I've tried Paragon - it destroyed the partition on a drive I didn't tell it to touch - but didn't manage to clone the OS disk. I tried Acronis, it got to 82% of the cloning process (in it's pre-startup applet) and then just stopped doing anything. Is all the software just rubbish? Or is there some fundamental problem that needs to be overcome here? I know I could just re-install, but that's a hassle I'd rather avoid, unless it's going to take stupid amounts of effort to clone this thing. Cheers!
Did you attempt the clone with Acronis by booting from the recovery CD? It should work, even with the trial version.
I may be wrong here I dont think you can clone to a smaller hard drive I'm sure thats where your problem is though. And Acronis is one of the best.
I wasn't, no. I just went into the windows GUI and told it to clone the OS disk to the free disk, and then it said it had to restart to complete. It restarts, boots into its wee pre-windows app, and got to 82% before just stopping and doing nothing else. I don't see why cloning to a smaller disk would cause problems in this day and age. I simply want to move around 143GB of data from a 500GB disk to a 300GB disk. Partition resizing is perfectly possible, and I can't see why it'd cause any problems with the bootsector.
Just found this thread same sort of thing might be of help. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic228555.html
Here's my advice. 1. Shrink your disk to around 250gb, using the Windows built-in Disk Management (guide here) http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/ 2. Download the CloneZilla Live CD ISO. 3. Either burn it, or use http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to put it on a USB pen (which will be wiped when you use this program). 4. Boot into CloneZilla, and copy disk<->disk. Use advanced mode, and ask it to attempt to extend the partition during clone to fill the target disk. If this fails you can use GParted LiveCD (or live USB using the same method) to perform ntfsresize. CloneZilla cannot shrink a partition, but if you pre-shrink it, it should work fine. I recently went from an 80gb 5400rpm to a 160gb 7200rpm on my work laptop (yesterday, in fact) and used the above method flawlessly, albeit without the shrinking step.
