Drive imaging to a lower-capacity target

[ddrueding]

Still shopping around for the easiest way to do this. More and more often I'm upgrading mid/low-end laptops with 128GB or 256GB SSDs from 500GB or 1TB HDDs, and I imagine I am not alone.

I love my hardware-level drive copiers, but they only work if the destination is larger (regardless of free/used space or partitions).

At the moment I'm still doing it the old fashioned way (using drive imaging software to create an image, restore the image with some partition fiddling). There must be something easier?

Thanks!

 

[Stereodude]

Your old fashioned way seems reasonable unless I'm missing something. I'm not sure how it would get easier.

 

[ddrueding]

Just bought a copy of Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0, we'll see if that is what it says.

 

[CougTek]

I love my hardware-level drive copiers,...

Works better when you follow the http : // model.

The easiest imaging program I've used is Easeus Todo Backup. I've not tried moving to a smaller volume, but there must be a way to do it inside the software.

 

[ddrueding]

Works better when you follow the http : // model.

Interesting. The link was a straight copy/paste from Amazon, and when I went to edit it in the original post, it was already correct and worked upon saving.

 

[Mercutio]

Disk clones often fail if more than a certain percentage of the drive is in use. I frequently find that it's necessary to pull user data off a drive prior to cloning. That's something that is theoretically scriptable, but can still take a stupid-long time. The magic number for cloning success seems to be about 66% free space.

 

[Stereodude]

It works fine if you resize the source partition to the size of the target drive before cloning. However, that's an extra and often time consuming step.

 

[ddrueding]

Just bought a copy of Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0, we'll see if that is what it says.

This has worked great so far, with a single exception that I don't think I can blame on the software. Trying to migrate "Home1" (sig) to the new X99 and m.ZX4 hard drive was unbootable. The copy looks flawless, likely just misses some system files to read the new setup. Might as well do a clean install...

 

[Clocker]

I may try this when I upgrade my Dad's aging 1TB disk to a SSD + HDD:

http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid-state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows

 

[Clocker]

This took some fiddling for me but what seemed to be the easiest thing to do was the following:

1.) On the old large hard drive, shrink down the size of the data partition so that it, when combined with the system reserved partition it is smaller than the size of the SSD. I used GPARTED to do that. To be able to do this, I moved the profile folders (i.e. My Documents etc.) to the new Hitachi HDD we also purchased, first. This will result in a significant amount of unallocated space on the old large HDD.

2.) Use the Clone option Acronis 2014 (came with the SSD) to clone the existing HDD to the SSD. It is configured in Windows, then Acronis reboots the system and does it's thing.

3.) Shut down. Remove old HDD. Reboot.

Everything loaded up great. The SSD was 'aligned' properly and Trim was enabled (this was on a Win 7 Home 64 setup).

Acronis would not do the clone unless I adjusted the partition size first.

 

[Mercutio]

See my post, above.
TrueImage (and most other Windows tools that do the same thing) can clone bigger to smaller, but only if all or at least most user data (or whatever is taking up space) has been moved off the drive. Depending on the PC in question, one process may be faster than the other. I normally prefer to move data regardless to avoid having to deal with firmware settings and boot modes or installing extra software that I might forget to remove.

 

[Clocker]

See my post, above.
TrueImage (and most other Windows tools that do the same thing) can clone bigger to smaller, but only if all or at least most user data (or whatever is taking up space) has been moved off the drive. Depending on the PC in question, one process may be faster than the other. I normally prefer to move data regardless to avoid having to deal with firmware settings and boot modes or installing extra software that I might forget to remove.

I agree with your post for the most part but, in my case, I had already moved the data off the drive (getting down to about 35GB on the source) and the clone process to the 128GB SSD would not even initialize. Arconis would try to do it but then crap out telling me to read the log file, which didn't give much useful info. Only after I re-sized the partition on the source drive would the clone process not crap out. It went very quickly that way after I figured out what would work. Maybe there are some other variables involved but that was my experience.

 

[Mercutio]

Interesting. I've not found a situation where the copy completely failed in that fashion.

 

[Stereodude]

Sometimes it depends where the data is in the partition. If there are files on the drive past the 128gB point on the HDD it may not clone to the smaller SSD (depending how it clones).