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I have a 500GB drive which is about 50GB full, I got a 80GB SSD, which has 74.5GB of available space. I want to clone the system drive onto the SSD.

DriveImage XML will not let me copy a larger drive to a smaller one.

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4 Answers

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You could use something like Gparted to resize the partition on the 500GB drive to a size that will fit on the SDD and then copy the partition from one drive to the other.

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FWIW, GPARTED is very slow on NTFS partitions. If you have VISTA or Windows 7, it will most likely be much faster if you use the OS to resize the partition first - they can even resize your "C:" drive. Here's how: Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management the right click on partition and "Shrink Volume". –  Adisak Feb 26 '10 at 23:50
Good to know. I generally don't use Windows machines so I was not aware of this. –  JRT Feb 28 '10 at 0:55
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Symantec Ghost 2003 will clone larger drives to smaller drives if the data will fit.

However, if the drive is a Vista boot drive using NTFS, you will have to use your Windows Install or Repair disc to "repair" the drive in order for it to boot. This isn't because the clone operation failed. It's because if you change the size of the NTFS boot volume without updating some parameter in Vista, it believes the HD is corrupt. This is a simple procedure that marks the correct size and then your drive works as expected.

I have done this successfully several times -- the most recent was when I went from a 300GB Velociraptor drive to a 160 GB Intel SSD for my Vista boot drive.

UPDATE: For Windows 7, you can use a newer version of Ghost like 11.5 -- Also, you may need to use "-NTEXACT" if you want the drive to boot.

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Use GParted and Clonezilla.

If you have Norton Ghost available that is the way to go, because it will do everything automatically. However, if you do not want to spend the money go with the GParted/ Clonezilla option, the way it works is like this:

  1. Use GParted to resize the source drive
  2. Boot the resized source drive so that the operating system in it can check for any possible filesyste errors.
  3. Use clonezilla to clone the drive

Read this article - it has everything step-by-step:


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Symantec Ghost (Ghost32.exe v11/2003) will do it, as long as the used space doesn't exceed the space available on the target volume.

Go to Local > Disk > To Disk, select source and destination drive and let it work its magic.

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Will the latest one do it also? Or does it have to be specifically the 2003 edition? –  user11955 Feb 26 '10 at 21:47
@yegor - there are 2 different versions of Ghost, the one i'm talking about is the 'real' ghost software, their consumer product is also called Ghost but totally unrelated, different software in fact, based on PowerQuest Drive Image which was purchased by Symantec a few years ago, the latest version of the 'real' Ghost software is included in the Ghost Solution Suite, AFAIK. –  Molly7244 Feb 26 '10 at 22:24
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