Cloning individual partitions

I have a new laptop that has a dedicated GPU that I am sure is only usable in Windows 8 as I think Asus has designed it to only be accessible using 8 and as I have now been trying for two months to download the driver for the NVidia the machine in 7 mode and it comes up with a message the GPU is not recognized as being a device in the machine although it is clearly there in system specs via HW Info and Speccy etc.

Now the 8 is on a 1TB spinner and I can only afford a 500GB SSD and my query is can I clone individual partitions using a program (I use Macrium a lot) if I first decrease the size of the large partition [C:] in the spinner using Partition Wizard? (I intend using the 8 in 7 style not quite the same but something is better than nothing)

Or does anyone know of another program that will do this ie EaseUS or Acronis or Aoimie etc

You cannot individually clone partitions with any program I know of; you can only clone entire drives. To transfer your C: partition from one drive to another with Macrium Reflect, you would need to image the C: partition, then restore the image to the destination drive. If you do not have room to stash the image on the source drive, you would need to use a third drive to stash the image on, then restore them image to the new drive.

Yes Jeannie I thought as much I am just peed off with Asus at the moment not making this machine able to install the GPU driver using Windows 7. I shall try something and see how it goes and will give your suggestion a go. :)

In 8.1 you need all partitions in order to operate. Just make one image including all partitions and restore those on the SSD. The partition sizes will be automatically adjusted by Macrium as long as the sum of the data fits on the 500GB.

From the Macrium help page:

Reorder partitions or automatically shrink partitions to fit the available space
Drag the source partitions to the target disk
Dragging resizes and moves partitions to fit the available space.

whs said:

In 8.1 you need all partitions in order to operate. Just make one image including all partitions and restore those on the SSD. The partition sizes will be automatically adjusted by Macrium as long as the sum of the data fits on the 500GB.

From the Macrium help page:

Reorder partitions or automatically shrink partitions to fit the available space
Drag the source partitions to the target disk
Dragging resizes and moves partitions to fit the available space.

For that matter, if you are going to move all the partitions to the SSD and the data within the source drive will fit within the destination drive, you can clone from the one drive to the other.

That is another option - if it works.

Thanks to you all I was rather hoping I could "condense" (if I understand it right) the second and largest partition on the original and very slow spinner into one that makes the total to be installed onto the 500GB equal or slightly less than 500GB - including any other partitions that come before it. I cannot exactly remember what the partitions were but they were small.

Anyway I shall try and if I get no luck then I shall just have to persist with the machine not having that GPU operational because Asus after much communication with their support sites obviously don' want to know or help with this issue

My last and only option is just have the machine use Windows 7 and be stuck with the Intel graphics (which are ok to a point) . But it will be galling to know I bought a machine that will not do or use what it has on board.

All in all between Asus and Microsoft Windows 8 it really has not been a pleasant ride - but I guess that is what you get for not researching enough although the seller / dealer did give the option of 7 which made me think everything was going to be ok.

Ok David I will do that when I get back to my partners place because I have for the last few days have been at mine, and the original drive is there.

The spinner from what I can remember only has the very small partition at the beginning of the space on it and the larger just a small amount of data, programs etc so at a rough guess the total amount should be less than 10% max of the total drive. I actually hardly used it at all.

But I will hook it up and send the screenshots as requested.

By the by the machine has two drive bays so yes I can put a spinner and a SSD in it.

The specs are Notebooks & Ultrabooks - ASUS ROG G750JM - ASUS < the storage is an option of the ones in that link. It is just that Asus made this one for Windows 8 without much forth thought for someone wanting 7 - that was an option I got from the dealer which I had put on a 256GB SSD.