Cloning a Hard Disk to a smaller one

emptybox

Point 6. You should be able to add the Windows partition to /etc/fstab to get Mint to mount it at boot up.

It's usual to mount it in /media/<username>/Windows rather than just /Windows, but I guess it wouldn't make much difference.

You probably know all this already, but if not I can give more detailed instructions.

fwor

Thanks, yes - it would just have been handy to get the installer to do it. For some reason it won't - maybe because only basic NTFS support is included in the installer's kernel? I don't know for sure, but as you say, I should try putting it in fstab later.

debitcardmayhem

fwor 6 is possibly because W10 is set to boot quicker, i.e. it starts from an image of the running system. That may be stopping you from mounting from Linux, I don't auto mount mine but it works fine as needed. W10 does not [STRIKE]clear[/STRIKE]set the clean bit on the "disk" unless it is cold shutdown. Maybe read this https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

fwor

Ah right - that could explain it - if the filesystem is detected as "dirty" then it won't mount - I saw some hints of that during my cloning attempts, where Clonezilla would not continue because the Win10 NTFS partition was not clean.

Then again it might be something else as DMESG returns a "mount options do not match the existing superblock" error. It's not a big issue - I can always just save any stuff I want to transfer between Mint and Windows on a pendrive!

debitcardmayhem

Hope that helps , why try to speed up startup if your Windows is on an SSD saves about 0.5 secs

fwor

Credit where it's due - now it's sorted itself out it does run quickly enough. It spent about an hour being pretty much unusable (i.e. you could click on an icon and the first sign that anything was happening was 2 minutes later!) but it's Ok now. So it runs about the same speed as Mint does.

I wish I didn't have to use Windows at all, but I have just one piece of software (a vehicle diagnostic tool) that will only run under Windows, and it runs too slowly in a virtual machine.