Cloning program & recovery partitions

alanrowell

I have a hard drive split into three partitions - Recovery, program & data.

Is there any way I can just clone the recovery & program partitions to a smaller hard drive producing a bootable hard drive? Fortunately SSDs are not involved.

fwor

Yes, usually you can, but how easy/hard depends on a number of factors, such as the filesystem being used and the partition types.

NTFS, for example, can usually be re-sized to a smaller partition, while some others can't.

If they are all Primary partitions it is generally easier than if some are Logical.

In the past I've used a combination of GPARTED to re-size and move partitions and Clonezilla to clone the MBR.

It should go without saying that you must back all of the data up before starting, as there's a chance it could all go horribly wrong (e.g. a power cut partway through one of the operations).

alanrowell

If I backed up the data partition then deleted the partition would that allow me to clone the drive rather than the partitions?

andy2004

todo backup free can clone disks / clone partitions. sector by sector if needed,