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The Issue:

The issue I have is that I have several hard drives ALL 250GB, however, they vary ever so slightly on the amount of sectors. When cloning with CloneZilla on Parted Magic, I get the volume size error. The drive I am using as the master just happens to be the one with the most sectors.

What I need to do:

I installed Vista and ran all the updates which took a couple of days to do in total, and I don't want to have to reinstall everything again. I now need to copy this to the other drives.

I tried:

Resizing the partition of the OS to around 200GB, and doing a partition copy, however this will not boot.

I also tried other software but all give the same error. I did try to set the option to ignore the size difference but it gave other errors.

Eric F
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user2924019
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    You can not copy a larger hard drive to a smaller one. – Eric F Mar 30 '16 at 18:32
  • Yes you can. Will post the solution I found – user2924019 Mar 30 '16 at 18:34
  • @user2924019 I did not down vote you. What I stated is still true.. you can not copy more than a drive has space for. That is true logic. What you state below in your "answer" is formatting the drives differently. That is different than physical drive space. To "clone" a drive would mean the same file structure, so no you still can't – Eric F Mar 30 '16 at 18:49
  • I use Acronis to do this, have done it many times. – Moab Mar 30 '16 at 19:26
  • I'm fairly certain Ghost can do this with ease. – Ben N Apr 02 '16 at 21:19

3 Answers3

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user2924019's answer is correct but I feel that clarifying and expanding on his answer requires an additional post.

"Cloning" a drive directly to a smaller drive is not possible so the article above walks through shrinking the partition/data on the drive so that it is the same size as the smaller destination drive. This is a very gimmicky way to move data to a separate drive and has a very real risk of causing your operating system to not be able to boot.

I'm going to give a general sense of the procedure because if you're familiar with the concepts then you'll be able to piece this together (or just read the article user2924019 posted).

This procedure can destroy any/all of the data in your source drive which is why you need to be very careful and consider whether or not you really need to do this.

Here's a breakdown of the process:

  1. Shrink the partitions on the source disk so they are the correct size and will fit into a smaller drive
  2. Use tools such as fsck to ensure the data on the source drive is still good. Typically when you reboot a *nix OS, the system will check and likely fsck your drive. You can't fsck a drive that's mounted so this is pretty much a leap of faith because you may have just lost data on the drive. I can't emphasize enough how big of a risk this is because changing the partition size screws up the partition table in the drive and the fsck is supposed to fix that issue. There are plenty of partition shrinking/expanding methods out there as this is an every-day issue in cloud computing but it's very risky!!!
  3. Once your source drive boots and works properly you can clone/DD your source drive to the destination drive.

As I said at the top, this is not a simple or obvious procedure and it is very easy to accidentally destroy any/all of your data - recovery at this point will be very difficult if this procedure is that new to you.

If none of the concepts above make any sense then I highly recommend you don't proceed.

Tony
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donu7
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  • I cloned to a larger hard drive first for a backup which I tested and worked fine before I shrank the partition on the original drive. – user2924019 Mar 31 '16 at 10:05
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I did a clone of a 1 terabite drive to a 480 ssd and had no trouble it booted just fine. I used easeUS just make sure that the bigger drive has less on it then size of littler drive. also do not check sector by sector and wored fine for me good luck

Greg
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http://www.geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-drive/

I found that you do need to do this the partition method, however, make sure that when you resize the OS partition, to ensure the OS boots afterwards.

Step 1: Download the GParted live CD

Step 2: Once GParted has finished booting, follow the steps in the picture down below.

1 – Click on “Resize/Move” and a new window will appear. 2 – Drag the right side of the partition bar to the left until the desired size is reached. 3 – Click on “Resize/Move” (the one on your current window) 4 – Click on “Apply” when done.

Operating System

Now that we have finished resizing our partition, let the computer boot so it can check the file system and fix any possible errors before we start to clone hard drive.

Clonezilla Backup

Step 1: Download the Clonezilla Live CD and boot your computer with it, click on “Start_Clonezilla” at the first screen of the wizard and click “Ok” to continue.

Step 2: Choose “Device-Image” and click “Ok“

Step 3: Choose “local-dev” and click “Ok“, make sure you have your USB external hard drive plugged in. If it was not, then plug it in now.

Step 4: Select you external hard drive from the list of available ones and click “Ok”

Step 5: Choose “top_directory_in_the_local_device“, this just means that you do not want to save your image inside any of the directories already created in the hard drive. Clonezilla will create a directory and store all image files there. Click “Ok“

Step 6: Select “saveparts” to save only the desired partition and not the entire drive. Click “Ok“

Step 7: Give the image a name and start cloning.

Clonezilla Restore

To restore the image, follow the same steps as in the “Clonezilla Backup” section in this tutorial and when you get to “step 6” select “restoreparts“, choose the hard drive image containing the partition you would like to restore and start the process.

user2924019
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