Cloning a Hard Disk to a smaller one

Neil_Jones

Clonezilla will not clone a big drive to a smaller drive, so you can't copy that 500Gb to the 250Gb even if you are using less than 250Gb. Norton Ghost will do it no questions asked.

Clonezilla may be able to do it if you shink the partition to less than 250Gb but I haven't tried this.

fwor

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Clonezilla may be able to do it if you shink the partition to less than 250Gb but I haven't tried this.

As said earlier, it won't - it seems to go by the volume size, not the sum of all partitions, so having unpartitioned space does not seem to help.

I'm starting to despair of getting anything useful out of Win10. At present it is just unusable - just seems to sit there all the time with the rotating circle instead of the mouse arrow pointer. It's not a fault with the laptop, as I've installed Mint on it and it works fine (off the SSD). I have a suspicion it's downloading loads of updates from MS, but if that's right it's shockingly bad implementation by MS - they should not let background tasks like that slow the machine down so much as to make it unusable.

I'm going to have another go at booting up Win10 (on the HDD, exactly as it came from the factory) and leaving it for an hour or so to see if it ever becomes responsive again. I was prepared to be impressed by Win10, so to say I'm disappointed is an understatement...

forgotmyname

Oh yes, had the fun of trying to restore a faulty windows 10 install.

Even though its wrong it knows best and kept trying to repair itself.

I formatted the stupid thing in the end.

debitcardmayhem

I ahd problems similar to yours and gave up and reinstalled W10, but then on a new m/c with uefi I followed this (well it was fedora) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#UEFI-native_and_BIOS-native_installations but also there is this for Mint(Ubuntu flavour) https://www.linux.com/learn/how-install-linux-windows-machine-uefi-secure-boot

Unfortunately I cannot find the instructions for the cloning I also followed, but I did it with Macrium, and I remember I had to disable the original HDD in the bios, but that was a desktop with both in place. If I can find it will report back , but my memory is unreliable these days:o

flashg67

I had the same issue. EaseUS is free let me clone all of the partitions from my HP 1tb drive to a 250gb SSD in one go and booted up first go

spud17

fwor wrote: »

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].

Doesn't the 4 primary partition rule only apply to MBR disks?
GPT disks allow many more primary partitions.
Also, I believe one of those blank partitions is to do with the Bitlocker function.
cba to check, but the Win 10 install creates the blank partition by default and it can be safely incorporated into an existing partition.
From Windows disk management, mine shows a 450 MB Recovery and 100 MB EFI System partition and I'm sure there's one more hidden from Windows.
(I could have had a drink).

debitcardmayhem

My newish laptop , which had W10 installed only originally
now looks like this (using fdisk -l in linux)
Disk /dev/sdb: 238.5 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 6FE2DDE1-18EC-45B6-BCB8-3A21603F7CBD


Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 923647 921600 450M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sdb2 923648 1128447 204800 100M EFI System
/dev/sdb3 1128448 1161215 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb4 1161216 385431551 384270336 183.2G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sdb5 385431552 481900543 96468992 46G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdb6 481900544 490289151 8388608 4G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdb7 490289152 498677759 8388608 4G Linux filesystem

Not sure if it helps much though
sdb1 is NTFS hidden.diag
sdb2 is fat32 boot, esp
sdb3 is ??unknown?? msftres
sdb4 is ntfs windows msftdata
sdb5,6,7 are linux ext4

were

Personaly I would defrag. Then make the sum partitions sizes to be smaller that the total amount of space on the new drive, as you may probably need a little bit free space due to cluster size.

Once it is all working and tested, would use acronis to copy the partitions and restore them.

toshi

Well, this is what I would do but it seems too late as you have modified original hard disk: ..


1) Install a disk clone utility (Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage, AOMEI Backupper to the original hard disk

2) Connect to external SSD USB, and perform diskclone. (I used AOMEI this time) you just select disk clone, (you don't have to worry about each partition size too much at this point) they would copy and resize all of them, let the application do it.

3) Swap the SSD with the hard disk (The original hard disk remains as it is, you have no worry to mess around your SSD partition here, you can do anything you want. )

4) Boot LinuxMint installer , use GPARTED, REZISE OR DELETE PARTITIONS, What I would do is to delete last two recovery partitions., I guess, one is system recovery partition, and another one is Windows recovery partition, (I am not absolutely sure here as I don't have a brand new HP computer with me)

5) Then I will use this free space for LinuxMint installation. (Yes, with UEFI environment, you may need to install LinuxMint manually. You just need to create 2 partitions, if you have 40GB, I would create 32GB as root (/) and 8GB as Linux Swap.

Swapfile size - people often suggest the same size as your system memory, as swapfile can be used for hibernation. (But some don't create any swapfile with an SSD for extending lifespan - but I think that it is rather old story.)

The difference between UEFI and Legacy in terms of multi-boot system.

Legacy(Bios) has one single MASTER BOOT RECORD (MBR) - So you have to choose Windows boot manager OR GRUB2.

UEFI doesn't use MBR but GPT, I don't talk detail here. See the below.

https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

Practically you install GRUB2 as before, but this time, LinuxMint will install UEFI compatible GRUB2

(Add: You need to hit F9 when HP logo appears,) then HP computer should let you select UEFI sources, then you should be able to select UEFI Ready Windows boot manager or UEFI ready GRUB2 menu.

(Please note unlike Legacy MBR, each boot manager can co-exist) Well, I prefer old MBR (lol) as simply I am so familiar with it. But UEFI has clear advantages for multiboot as well, as both can co-exist!

But until recently, the hardware UEFI support was not really good, so many confusion, but as far as I know, HP hardeware UEFI support has been really good.)

Hope it helps.

fwor

Thanks for some useful and interesting advice. In the end I went with Grumpycrab's recommendation (especially as I'm not ~certain~ that a Win install on an HDD will deal with an SSD properly if just cloned across).

Here are the steps:

1. Get Win10 running on the new HDD, install Windows Media Creation Tool, get it to download Win10 installation media and burn it to a DVD.

2. Use the MS Powershell utility to get the Windows licence key (I didn't need it for the re-install but I have it now for future use, just in case.)

3. Reformat the SSD and create 3 partitions at the far end as placeholders for Linux (one for /, one for /home and one for swap).

4. Go into the BIOS and enable legacy boot (which turns of Secure Boot, thank God).

5. Install Win10 from the DVD into the unpartitioned space at the start of the SSD.

6. Install Linux Mint using the "something else" option to use the partitions created earlier, leaving all of the Win10 stuff unchanged (sadly I could not get it to mount the Windows directory as /windows while Linux is running).

7. Go into the BIOS and change the UEFI boot order so that I get Mint first - so I only get to see Windows when I need to, and not every time it boots!

I should add that as it's a laptop for carrying around for diagnostic work, I chose the Linux "encrypt my Home folder" option, as that's the only place where I expect to keep sensitive info - hopefully that will be a good enough security measure in case it gets lost/nicked...

Thanks again for all the pointers.