Moving OS to smaller Hard Drive Win7

Les McLean

Les McLean

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Updated my SSD , and I want to transfer the OS to new (smaller) drive.

Tried windows method (system image/restore), but won't let you restore from a larger drive to smaller.

Old drive is a 160GB SSD, new one is 120GB SSD, I tried re-sizing the partition the OS is on (old drive) to a partition smaller than the new drive, but still won't let me restore.

After the usual googlemarathon, plenty of suggestions, but most written by folk from the shallow end of the gene pool, consequently a lot of wasted time, and no solution.

As most of the computer gurus on TP come from the top end of the gene pool, can anyone offer a solution, if not it's a fresh install.

Thanks
 
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Acronis True Image Home should allow you to clone the boot partition from old drive to new.
 
You need to shrink the partition on the 160G drive to about 110 or less before using the win backup method. Control panel->Administrative tools>computer management select disk, right click and resize partition will be there. If you can't do it in one go, you may need to delete/move files around. There's a tool to help with that in computer management somewhere. It is obvious when you are there
 
arad85 said:
You need to shrink the partition on the 160G drive to about 110 or less before using the win backup method. Control panel->Administrative tools>computer management select disk, right click and resize partition will be there. If you can't do it in one go, you may need to delete/move files around. There's a tool to help with that in computer management somewhere. It is obvious when you are there
Click to expand...

Thanks, but I did, shrunk it to 90GB, but still no good.
 
I did this with a 500Gb drive on my netbook.

Windows disk management would only let me shrink the volume to 420Gb even though there was virtually nothing on it. The reason is un movable files.

Solution was to install Raxco softwares' perfect disk which has a 15 day free trial. It's a defrag program that can move normally unmovable files. It has an option 'prepare for shrink' and after running that I could resize the volume down to 28GB if I wanted to!

Edit oh and I made a system image backup of the new small drive and restored it to the 128Gb SSD with no problem. It was like nothing had happened afterwards....literally. The netbook wasn't much faster lol.
 
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Another option would be to use something like Symantec Ghost which can backup and restore to different sized disks. Not sure if there's a free version though...
 
snowy said:
Another option would be to use something like Symantec Ghost which can backup and restore to different sized disks. Not sure if there's a free version though...
Click to expand...

Can it definitely? The version that Samsung provide with their ssd doesn't.
 
neil_g said:
Can it definitely? The version that Samsung provide with their ssd doesn't.
Click to expand...

I've just checked and it appears I'm wrong - sorry! I thought it could but apparently not, so we're back to reducing the partition size before doing the backup (Partition Magic lets you do that very easily).
 
I've just checked and Acronis True Image Home will clone one drive to another. If the new drive is smaller than the old drive, and the old drive is partitioned, then ATIH will attempt to create partitions of the new drive with the same proportions as the old drive.

Suppose your old drive is 160GB, partitioned into 40GB (C:) and 120GB (D:) partitions. If your new drive is 120GB then ATIH will attempt to create two partitions of 30GB and 90GB. Obiously C: on the old drive must contain less that 30GB of data and D: less than 90GB.
 
I just used clonezilla to do mine, resized the partition first then you can select what partition you want to clone and to which drive. Free download using an iso image which needs to go on a disc or usb drive. I'm on my phone so can't get links sorry.

It looks more complicated than it is
 
As has been said Acronis True Image will do this. I did it this way when I moved my OS drive from a standard HD to a 256GB SSD. I just had to clear a load of space on the OS drive first so the partition would fit onto the SSD.

I've never used clonezilla before, but it sounds like it's worth looking into.
 
Thanks everyone for the help , but I've copped out on this, couldn't get it to move drives using Acronis or Clonezilla, and I think it was my ineptitude rather than the programs.

I was going to put the new SSD in my windows machine and relegate the 3 year old SSD to my Mac -replacing a conventional hard drive, mainly because I use my Windows machine far more than the Mac.

What I'll probably do is wait until my Windows machine is ready for a clean install of Win7 and buy another SSD and re-install on that.

Although the windows machine meets my needs far more than a mac, the transfer of the OS +everything else from the old drive to the new SSD on the Mac was a cinch, dead easy and took around 15minutes without the faff you need to under Windows.
 
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