Cloning a hard drive

[Bristolian]

Hi folks,

I have a nearly new HP laptop which came with a 1TB HDD installed (of which just 146GB is actually used) and I'm thinking of replacing that with an SSD to speed up booting and file handling. According to Macrium Reflect the 1TB drive has five partitions:
1. NO NAME - FAT32 LBA Primary - 260MB of which 80.3MB is used
2. (None) - Unformatted Primary - 16MB of which 16MB is used
3. Windows (C) - NTFS Primary - 915.05GB of which 146.79GB is used
4. Windows RE Tools - NTFS Primary - 980MB of which 426.7MB is used
5. RECOVERY (D) - NTFS Primary - 15.23GB of which 13.42GB is used

I don't need 1TB of space and could easily make do with 256GB and just happen to have a new, unused 256GB SSD handy.

When I try to clone the HDD it says there's not enough space on the SSD - is there a way around this?

The laptop is running W10 Home 64bit with all the current updates installed, the processor is an i5-7200U and there is 8GB of RAM installed.

TIA

 

[droj]

Is it possible to clone selectively from the above list?

The main focus though is surely the Windows partition (C) - new pc's often come with a load of junk provided by the manufacturer - can you prune that?

My ssd for Windows and apps is 500Gb and that seems a comfortable fit. (the bulk of my photo files are on separate hdd's).

 

[stupar]

I believe you will need to repartition the current hard drive so that it theoretically reads as a smaller size (less than 256GB but more than the cumulative total of your current HD contents).

At the moment macrium wants to make 1TB fit onto 256GB even though your not maxed out so it's flags it as a "no can do" scenario.

I use partition wizard to repartition hard drives. It's a fairly simple process.

 

[holty]

ask one of the geeks in currys/pc world
there switched on cookies

 

[Tori_T]

W7 and above create a non-visible system partition in addition to the C: drive, if installed on an empty drive (it won't be present if a machine's been upgraded from XP or Vista) I've not used Macrium, but I'd guess it's partition 1 on that list. You'll need to copy that across as well, or the machine won't boot.
Here's what it looks like in W7 management tools:

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Never a problem on Unix systems like Linux or Apple's OS-X. Just sayin'...

For the future, Stuart's advice to repartition is the best approach to your difficulty.

 

[Bristolian]

I believe you will need to repartition the current hard drive so that it theoretically reads as a smaller size (less than 256GB but more than the cumulative total of your current HD contents).

At the moment macrium wants to make 1TB fit onto 256GB even though your not maxed out so it's flags it as a "no can do" scenario.

I use partition wizard to repartition hard drives. It's a fairly simple process.

I repartitioned the big drive and managed to clone it to the smaller SSD so thanks for your suggestion Stuart.

I'll get the SSD installed this evening and see how it goes

 

[Bristolian]

Many thanks for the guidance and suggestions above. Hopefully we have success - I should know tonight when I swap the dsrives over.

Fingers crossed!

 

[Bristolian]

Just to finish this thread off, I installed the new SSD into the laptop last night and hey presto! It works

No time to test the improvement in boot time (it was waay past my bed time) but accessing folders and files is definately faster, as one would expect, and I still have plenty of free space on the drive.

More memory next

Cheers one and all for the assistance