Cloning a Hard Disk to a smaller one

fwor

I've just bought a new HP laptop with a 500GB conventional drive, with the intention of replacing that with a smaller (250GB) SSD that I had in a previous laptop.

The plan was to retain Win10 (which comes pre-installed on the 500GB HDD) and install my preferred OS (Linux Mint) alongside it to dual-boot.

Problem is that HP/Microsoft do something ghastly with the formatting of their HDD's - so it has five primary partitions and some weird flags set on some of them, which means that I can't just use something like Clonezilla to copy the individual partitions across.

Ideally I'd like to clone the HDD to the smaller SSD - which would obviously mean re-sizing one of the partitions in the process. Anyone know of any tools that will allow this (Clonezilla won't)?

Or can anyone suggest another way to solve the problem? Naturally I don't have any installation media for Win10, or I would just stick that in and do an install from scratch...

forgotmyname

I would have thought Clonezilla would, it can resize partitions.

Acronis can if that cannot.

Or create a partition larger than the excess, ie your 500GB drive onto a 200GB SSD. Create a 300GB blank/empty partition and when cloning untick that partition.

fwor

The problem is not resizing partitions - I can do that easily with GPARTED. The problem is that Clonezilla (by default, anyway) simply won't allow you to clone a drive to one that's a different size.

Are you saying that Acronis will allow you to clone a whole drive (including MBR and all the EFI stuff that gets put in the partition at the front) when the drives are a different size?

John_Gray

Your hard drive has been formatted as UEFI rather than MBR, hence the plethora of partitions.
Either Macrium Reflect Free or Acronis TrueImage should be able to do the 'clone' operation, and no doubt other programs also.

I am going to have to do something similar soon, transferring from a 750 GB hard drive to a Crucial 240 GB SSD. Have a look at their website - you get a free cut-down copy of Acronis with SSD purchase for this very purpose.

toshi

As John said, clone utilities (Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage) do the job on this purpose, I can add AOMEI Backupper, (I just tested this as well, works very well too)

https://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html

UEFI /Win10 is quite messy, I have removed a recovery partition (final part of the disk around 20GB) - this is used for Windows 10 automatic recovery programme, but you can create a recovery disk /usb instead.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=create+windows+10+recovery+flashdrive&t=ffab&ia=web

Once you can manage a disclone, then as you said, you can use Gparted which is included in Linuxmint installer.

Happy SSD computing

fwor

Thanks very much for the suggestions - I will try one of those suggested.

UEFI seems to me a real mess, and it's almost as though Microsoft's disk setup is designed to make life difficult for people who want to dual-boot, but perhaps that's just me being paranoid...

System

Hi

The usual is 4 partitions, a boot and then a C: with 2 areas for recovery.

You can make recovery USB from the W10 install as it stands.
You can use the standard W10 OS made from the Creators tool and then goto the HP page and download all the software for your PC (or do it first).

clonezilla cloned my recovery area onto a 16 gb USB, and it is worth noting that the F11 function does a Factory Fresh install wiping everything and then spends a coupla days undergoing MS updates to current 1709.

So make your own.

The W10 key can be found by this CLI from Mint etc.
sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM | strings | tail -n 1

Obviously using the MS OS made with Creator Tool and navigating to the X: or C: in Advanced Option : Command Prompt

and typing something like:- xcopy C:\* G:\ /e /i /h

or just c:\users\* G:\ /e /i /h

Copies a lot of stuff, almost as good as a clone.

Bear in mind the Activation key may throw a wobbler because of the HD replacement.

fwor

johndough wrote: »

The usual is 4 partitions, a boot and then a C: with 2 areas for recovery.

In this case it's 5 - the EFI part, then a 16M partition that is completely empty and unformatted but has a MSFTRES flag on it, then the main Win partition, then two recovery partitions.

It still looks suspiciously like the second (empty) partition is there just to make life difficult for people who want to do something other than the "standard" install...

What I'm now thinking of doing is running up Win10 on the original HDD, getting it to make me a set of installation media on CD/DVD using the Windows Media Creation tool - but I've got a bit of internet searching to do to find out if that's possible. If so, it may be best to do an install from scratch on the SSD.

emptybox

You can surely clone any number of partitions to your SSD, as long as the collective size doesn't exceed that of the SSD.
You'd just have to resize the Windows partition to make it fit.

You can make a recovery drive from within Windows 10, you don't need the Media Creation Tool to do it.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4026852/windows-create-a-recovery-drive
That way you could dispense with the need to clone the recovery partition to the new drive.

fwor

emptybox wrote: »

You can surely clone any number of partitions to your SSD, as long as the collective size doesn't exceed that of the SSD.
You'd just have to resize the Windows partition to make it fit.

It's not quite that simple. For a start, there is ~supposed~ to be a rule that you cannot have more than 4 primary partitions on a HDD - but perhaps UEFI has removed that rule. If so, nobody seems to have told the people that write the Linux Mint installer.

[Edit: having just checked, UEFI ~does~ remove the 4 partition limit, and removes the whole primary/extended partition concept, so I'm not sure why my Linux Mint 18.3 installer is refusing to install alongside Win10].

I think there may also be a problem that UEFI includes absolute sector addresses for partition boundaries - so if you change the size the boot data no longer makes sense. I may be wrong about that - but at the moment it looks like it's true, because if I just do a re-size but stay on the original HDD, it won't boot any more.

grumpycrab

I'd go for a clean install of Windows 10 and Linux. Nothing like the New Year for a Spring-clean of your partitions!