Cloning bigger (100 GB) drive on the smaller one (80 GB)

[lobo1978]

Hi, is it possible to clone entire drive (by resizing the selected partition) from bigger to smaller drive (100GB->80GB)?
Already tried Acronis but it failed. Cloning partition by partition, damages RR area. Any alternative software? Please help!

[Superego]

What problems did you have with Acronis? I just spent this past weekend using True Image 10 to clone several hard drives, including going from smaller to larger and vice versa. I can't make any recommendations for other software, as I haven't used any others.

[andyP]

lobo1978,

if you use Acronis to clone to a smaller drive you must manually adjust the size of the service partition, on target drive, to the same or larger size as on the original drive. Acronis will otherwise automatically reduce the size of all partitions proportionally depending on drive size.

[lobo1978]

Thanks for the replies, but Acronis (latest demo from the website) refuses to do cloning - the error message appear that the destination disk is too small to be cloned... or the destination (smaller drive) contains errors - I have removed all partitions, leaving the drive completely blank...

[gator]

you need to resize the data partition in the 80 GB drive. Choose the manual option in acronis and check up the sizes of the partitions in souce drive and how it shows up in the destination before cloning.

[nik]

Dumb question, perhaps: is there at least 20 or 25 GB of free space on the 100GB drive?

[lobo1978]

Thanks for the replies, but I have finally migrated to 5K250 250GB .

Dumb question, perhaps: is there at least 20 or 25 GB of free space on the 100GB drive?

Yes there was plenty of room on both partitions (in total circa 40-50GB).

[eecon]

Thanks for the replies, but Acronis (latest demo from the website) refuses to do cloning - the error message appear that the destination disk is too small to be cloned... or the destination (smaller drive) contains errors - I have removed all partitions, leaving the drive completely blank...

Maybe there were some minor defects on the 80GB that were not apparent or affecting it's previous operation but Acronis 11 saw them and advised to use a healthy drive?

As a quick test, I just cloned my 100GB ThinkPad drive (with only about 25 GB on its single C: Primary Partition and a 5.58 GB Service Partition) over to an old USB 80GD drive that I had sitting in a drawer.
I used the Eval Version of Acronis 11 with no problems (I just used Manual Mode to bump the Service Partition back up to 6 GB on the smaller target drive)