Clonezilla to Clone Bigger to Smaller drive (e.g., SSD)

Here are the steps to easily clone a larger hard drive (Drive1) to a smaller SSD hard drive (Drive2) for free--something I do frequently to speed up a PC without purchasing a new one.

Assumptions

  1. You know the basics of Clonezilla, GParted, and partitioning.
  2. You want to clone locally--that is, disk-to-disk (though this procedure likely works with images too)
  3. You've already connected Drive1 and Drive2 to the computer (e.g., use the CD-ROM's SATA and power cables)
  4. You're cloning Windows XP (though this probably works on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8)

Requirements

  1. USB drive, preferably a pen drive or similar.
  2. YUMI, allows your USB drive to run multi-boot Clonezilla and GParted
  3. Clonezilla ISO
  4. GParted ISO
  5. Follow the instructions on YUMI's website to load Clonezilla and GParted to your USB drive

Shrink Drive1

  1. Boot your PC to USB drive and select GParted
  2. Select Drive1 (upper-right corner of GParted's window)
  3. Right-click Drive 1's largest partition and select Resize
  4. If Drive2 is 128GB, resize Drive1 to, say, 100GB
  5. Reboot using Drive1 and let Windows finish chkdsk (this MUST complete successfully to continue!)

Clone Drive1 to Drive2

  1. Reboot to YUMI and select CloneZilla
  2. Select local disk to local disk and then EXPERT mode
  3. Tick the icds option
  4. Don't select the k1 option (as suggested elsewhere online--see credits), as this created a partition too small (50GB) to continue
  5. Select your favorite CloneZilla options and reboot
  6. Unplug Drive1 and voilà!

Credits

Comments

Thanks heaps Sean,
I've been wanting to do this for a while and your tutorial worked perfectly.
I confirmed it all in a Virtual Box environment going from a 50GB Win 7 machine to a 30GB Win 7 machine.
It worked flawlessly.
The disk to disk and the -icds option were the key steps.

Just curioius: Do you think you can do it via a disk to image first then back?... I couldn't see the icds option when considering this possibility.

Many thanks
Sam
samrusso4 _AT_ gmail.com

This worked perfectly for Win7 x 64 - thanks for posting this!

Thanks for this, appreciate you putting it online.

Thank you for posting this. I tried many solutions (Acronis, EasyUS) with varying degrees of failure and I had hopes Clonezilla would do the job. After a couple of failed attempts, I found your post and the tip to use the icds option sealed the deal.

Add new comment

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.