Clone HDD to smaller SSD

September

2023

windows

14 September 2023 17:45

When cloning an HDD with an operating system, the size of the SSD is almost always smaller than the original one.

The following procedure is designed for the machine whose disks we are working on to be an OS Windows PC.
To work you will need Partition Wizard or AOEMI Partition Assistant software and a boot disk Clonezilla and a DVD drive, an external hard drive with a capacity no less than the data stored on the disk.

Procedure

1)Find out the volume of folders with the operating system and data (in Windows, select the packs and right-click - the "Properties" menu; in Linux - in the same way, using the right mouse button on the home folder - "File Properties")
2) Data (documents, photographs, videos), if available, you need move from HDD to external hard drive.
3)Decrease(resize) partition with the operating system (Windows - Disk Manager - Compress) or using programs like Partition Wizard or AOEMI Partition Assistant. Ideally, you need to reduce the main OS volume to 80 GB.
4)Write off sizes, properties and attributes of partitions of the source HDD disk, for example:

250 MB - reserved by the system, NTFS, boot, system
80 GB - system, NTFS.
5)Initializing the SSD disk. by connecting it to a PC with an old Windows OS, the second disk ("This PC" - "Manage" - "Disk Manager" will ask you to create a partition table type - GPT or MBR).
6) Using Partition Wizard or AOEMI Partition Assistant create partitions on the new SSD disk, size no less than on the original HDD. For example
600 MB - NTFS, boot
90 GB - NTFS.
7)Loading into DVD-ROM drive disk Clonezilla, boot from it and go to advanced mode (for advanced users)copy the data from disk to disk as follows:
sda1 -> sdb1
sda2 -> sdb2
sda3 -> sdb3
etc.
Remove the switch to transfer partition table (the -k option is disabled),resize proportionally- enable, no need to align partitions, no need for grub2, copy the boot sector. After completing all operations, remove the disk.
8) Need update the OS list on the new disk. Why do we reboot in Windows while holding down the Shift key - Additional boot options - Boot to command line.
bootrec /FixMBR
bootrec /FixBoot
bootrec /ScanOs
bootrec /RebuildBCD
(Before executing the commands, I disconnected the old hard drive - the commands were executed in relation to the new SSD).
9)Changed the boot order of hard drives in the BIOS- set booting from SSD first.
10) Booted Windows from a new disk. Using Partition Wizard, I expanded the size of the Windows system partition to the full size of the SSD (dragged the right border of the partition) - in this case, 120 GB.
11)Old hard drive HDD will be used to store data as second disk. The entire volume of which can be allocated for data. To do this, I deleted partitions from the HDD,created a single section in their place for the entire volume of the disk, format it in NTFS, copy data from the external disk.