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

I'm trying to clone/migrate my OS, Win 7 Pro x64, to a 60GB flash drive. I've searched SevenForums for existing threads on this problem and have tried two suggested programs, Disk Genius and Hasleo. Both tout the ability to let the user clone just the OS, not entire disk. But when the moment comes, neither program lives up to its promise. They both refuse to let me clone my OS to a smaller drive. I've added up the sizes of all the top level folders except for "users". The total is less than 29GB. So there's plenty of room on the flash drive for my OS and installed programs.

Can anyone suggest a free (not trial version) program that actually does what it claims?


Thank you!

To SIW2,

Here are the screenshots. Hopefully, I'm just not using Disk Genius correctly.




To townsbg,

I'm not trying to exclude system files associated with the "users" folder and subfolders during migration. I merely excluded its size from my calculations for the needed disk space as I believe it is the only folder that contains my personal files. And it is my understanding that a system migration does not migrate personal files but perhaps I'm wrong.


Thank you both!

I guess I'll go ahead and try that. I'm pretty much down to just the two drives now. So I'll have to first put the image on the destination drive, copy and paste it to the system drive, then recover to the destination drive.

I was really looking forward to the whole cloning thing since (from what I've heard) that bypasses the whole image creation step. I sure thought everywhere I read and listened, migrating the OS was cloning the OS, and cloning the OS was not cloning the whole disk. So I guess all of that is crap. Don't know how I kept getting that wrong in so many places. Is there not a free program that will just clone the OS and installed programs without creating an image first?

- - - Updated - - -

I'm now trying to recover the partition image, but I'm getting a prompt asking, "The Master Boot Record(MBR) has been changed. Do you want to restore it to the selected time point?" Sounds like I need to get this one right on the first time, but I don't know what the answer is. I'm guessing that I should want to swap the MBR in the image file for the MBR on the flash drive, which would mean I should select, No. I think selecting, Yes, would change the MBR on the flash drive to whatever is in the image file, which I don't think is what I should want. Do I have any of that right?

To samuria and SIW2,

I'm not yet at the point of trying to boot from the flash drive. I'm still just trying to recover the partition, but DiskGenius wants to know, "Do you want to restore [the MBR] to the selected time point?" before it will recover the image. But I can tell you that my active OS is running from an external SSD via USB thanks to the code provided by SIW2, so as far as I know the computer should be able to boot from the flash drive once the image has been recovered. And the flash drive currently holds bootable installation files for Windows 7 Pro x64. I just need to know if I should restore the MBR. I presume it means to restore the MBR on the flash drive to a setting in the image. But the setting in the image is for the OS on the external SSD. I'll also mention that DiskGenius made me boot from another drive just to create the image.




To townsbg,

I'm not disputing that "users folder contains more than your personal files". And as I said before, I'm not trying to exclude system files associated with the users folder and subfolders. Nor am I trying to exclude the folders themselves. But thank you.