Can't clone my OS to a smaller drive with Disk Genius or Hasleo.

It still says "Target partition too small". The size on disk (on the source partition) of the image is 28.6GB. Does the size more than double upon recovery?

Yeah, I know. Don't know what that's about.

You need to clone the drive to another external HDD or SSD. It doesn't make sense to do anything like that with a flash drive.

The only way to easily clone a large system partition to a smaller drive is to first resize it so that will fit on the smaller drive.

A few days ago I cloned my laptop HDD with a dual boot of Windows 7 and 10 to an external SSD. When done I removed the HDD and replaced it with the SSD.

To clone the drive I booted a flash drive with the cloning program on it. The HDD was 250GB while the SSD was 500GB. It must have taken 1-2 hours to do the clone. Note this cloning program automatically resized the partitions so both Windows 7 and 10 partitions were larger and together filled the new drive.

To MisterEd,

"The only way to easily clone a large system partition to a smaller drive is to first resize it so that will fit on the smaller drive."

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by resize? Do you mean delete all my personal files from the source drive?



To SIW2,

I thought the original uncompressed files didn't even add up to 32GB, but upon redoing the calculations I've discovered that the AppData folder in my user profile amounts to about 24GB. I can also account for a few more GB simply by being more exact this time, instead of estimating, so that still leaves 23GB unaccounted for. I'm providing screenshots of what I'm including in my calculations. The sizes are based on "Size on disk" in "Properties" for each folder. In the first screenshot, I'm showing the total for all items in the C: folder, except for "Users". The second screen shot shows the total for all folders in C:\Users, except for my user profile, Danny. The third pic shows the total for all folders in C:\Users\Danny, except for Downloads, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos. In DiskGenius, I tick the box next to these folders to exclude their contents, shown in the fourth screenshot.

Any suggestions as to where to find the unaccounted for 23GB?

Danny S said:

To MisterEd,
"The only way to easily clone a large system partition to a smaller drive is to first resize it so that will fit on the smaller drive."
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by resize? Do you mean delete all my personal files from the source drive?

I assume that if you add up all the used space it is much smaller than the size of the partition. If so you might be able to reduce the partitions size to just a little more than is needed to hold the files.

Normally the parts of a files are scattered all over the drive unless the drive is defragmented. Even if this is done then certain system might not to be easily moved. In the past I have used a partitioning program that automatically defragments the drive and then reduces the partition down to just enough to hold the files. The process reduces the free space with the now unused space call unallocated.

Here is a simple diagram that shows the process. Note that partition contains both used and free space. Now the partition contains the same data but is much smaller.

To MisterEd,

Thank you! I genuinely enjoyed learning that bit of information.

It looks, though, that DiskGenius did at least create an image that is significantly smaller (82GB) than the used space on my hard drive (780GB). Perhaps, if I just go out and buy a larger flash drive, say 100GB, then it'll finally recover that image, if it really is 82GB, to the 100GB flash drive.

I no longer want to store so many personal files on the same drive as my OS, so the drive running my OS doesn't need to be 500+ GB. But I don't want to start over with a fresh install of Windows either. So that's why it makes sense to me to try to clone only my OS and installed programs to a smaller drive. I'm trying to move everything except my personal files. And I'm now realizing that my initial attempts might have been successful had I just used a 100GB flash drive, but somehow I've miscalculated the capacity that I need.

Got a new flash drive, 128GB nominal (114GB actual).

Recovered partition image.

Went to "Computer". Went to "Properties" for the flash drive. It says, "Used space: 52.6GB; Free space: 61.9GB".

What happened to 82GB?

If it only used 52.6GB, then why the f*** didn't it let me recover to the 57GB flash drive?


Oh, and the computer won't boot from it either. Re-ran (as administrator) the .bat file provided by SIW2 in another thread that makes it possible to boot from a USB drive (which has worked in other cases), but I did have to change the target drive letter within the code. Still won't boot. I can access the files on the drive, though.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll try to recover the partition again, only selecting "Yes" to the question about the MBR this time.