Cloning a hard drive to a smaller drive

[Stan_Lite]

Currently, I have a Windows 7 machine with two 500GB drives in RAID0 making a 1TB(ish) drive. I want to get rid of the RAID and transfer the contents to just one of the 500GB drives and use it with another machine (I've backed up all the files and removed a lot of stuff so there's only about 60GB of stuff on there (mostly Windows files and program files)). I've had a look around and can't find much about transferring to a smaller drive.

Does anyone know if I'll be able to do it with any of the available software? I don't mind paying for Acronis or the likes as long as I know it'll work. I really don't want to have to re-install everything if I can possibly avoid it. The machine is perfect the way it is but I want to move the stuff there onto another one.

[Zirax]

One way would be to shrink the partition down and then clone over. Many moons ago partition magic would do the trick but I'm not sure on the latest tool to use.

[Daz]

gparted on your friendly Ubuntu live CD will do it too. That's how I've always done it, shrink everything first, then clone it.

[Feek]

Breaking the RAID will kill the data though won't it?

If you have a spare external drive you could knock up a bootable USB stick with Clonezilla on it, clone the disk onto the external drive, break your RAID and then clone it back to a single drive again using Clonezilla.

We use Clonezilla a lot at work, it works really well.

[Stan_Lite]

I forgot to say, I have a 500GB portable HDD I can store the image on while I break the raid. I have a bootable USB with Ubuntu on it so I'll give that a try tonight.

[Mark]

Backup! But then you already have. :)
Defragment the drive (in Windows).
Fire up the Live CD and use gparted to shrink it.
Use an image tool to copy the data over. My weapon of choice is dd but it's a command-line tool so takes a bit of figuring. If I want to keep an image I'll wipe free space and then compress the image, but that isn't necessary for this job.
Break the mirror and copy the image back.

[Stan_Lite]

Everything is backed up and windows partiton is cleaned and defragged.

I'm using the copy and paste in gparted itself (in progress as we speak). I have a spare HDD I took out of a laptop when I upgraded. I'm going to try it out with that first in the new machine. If that works, I'll break up the old mirror, install one of the drives in the new machine and try that. Doing it like this will be long-winded but at least I'll know if it's going to work before I break the mirror.

[Burble]

Break the mirror and copy the image back.

It's stripe set, not a mirror.

</pedant>

[Mark]

Good point. I was thinking RAID 1, not 0. :)

[LeperousDust]

I used EASEUS Partition Master recently, albeit to move from a smaller to larger drive, but it gave me the feeling it would do things either way. I used it because it was part of a free giveaway when i think its normally paid. One of the sites a frequent gave it rave reviews, and i was moving data that week. I'd use it again in a flash, very impressed :)

Linky (http://www.partition-tool.com/)

[Stan_Lite]

Well. That worked an absolute treat.

Copied and pasted the Windows partitions to the portable HDD, switched over to the new rig and copied from the portable HDD to the new rig. When I booted up, I got the "DISK BOOT FAILURE...." message. Booted from the Windows 7 disk and did the repair boot thing and managed to boot into Windows.

Because it was all new hardware, Windows had to find and install new drivers etc but it did all that on it's own (the only thing I had to do was uninstall the Nvidia drivers from the old rig and install ATI drivers for the new rig).The whole process took about 2 hours altogether but a lot of that will have been down to copying the Windows partition image to and from a USB drive. Now I have the new rig set up the way I want it, I can attach the laptop HDD internally and one of the currently raided drives and the transfer should be a lot quicker. Everything was there - Winamp with all my preferences, Firefox with all my favourites etc. Avast still working away etc etc. Everything I had working on the old PC now works on the new PC with virtually no interference :cool:

I ****ing love GParted. I've always thought it was a very useful tool but I see now how good it really is. For a straight transfer, internally, of a Windows install, I reckon it would do it in less than an hour. If I was doing it manually with Windows, by the time I uninstalled Windows and re-installed it and installed all of my programs, I reckon I'd be looking at 5-6 hours.

I raise my glass to the creator of GParted :beer:

[Mark]

Add to that the nice bonus that it works with the new WD 4K drives - unlike Windows XP. :D

[Jonny69]

*Noted to self for future use*