Cloning from large drive to small

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Blaise170

Blaise170

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Sep 12, 2013
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I have a 1TB HDD and 80GB HDD. On the 1TB HDD is Windows 7 which I would like to copy over to the 80GB. The drive is only using about 50GB total. When I try to clone however, I get errors that the destination HDD is too small. The partition is indeed 900GB, but I can only shrink it down to 480GB under Disk Management. Is there a way to shrink it down to under 80GB so that I can clone it? I'd like to replace the 1TB with the 80GB.
 
Solution
giantbucket
I once got a 100G partition down to under 60G and that took many steps, many days, and many reboots. And there's usually some asinine 1k file way at the end that Windows just can't possibly move without throwing us to the dark ages.

Yeah, you'll have to delete restore points, turn off the ability to make restore points, defrag, clear our temps, cure polio (again), and a handful of other things, and repeat a few of them a few times.

Oh, and each thine you do something, go back into disk management to see if you can shave off a few megs of space. Keep shaving. Don't worry - it won't grow back thicker and fuller.....
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Blaise170

Blaise170

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I don't have an OS disc with me right now though. I may try your second solution and see how it works.
 
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popatim

popatim

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You might have to delete hidden things like restore points and virtual memory as they use drive space which windows doesn't usually report. Windows itself is pretty small and you shouldn't have much problem shrinking down to 80gb.

You can use a disk analyzer utility to see whats using your space. Something like WinDirStat should work fine for you.
 
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giantbucket

giantbucket

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Nov 17, 2013
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I once got a 100G partition down to under 60G and that took many steps, many days, and many reboots. And there's usually some asinine 1k file way at the end that Windows just can't possibly move without throwing us to the dark ages.

Yeah, you'll have to delete restore points, turn off the ability to make restore points, defrag, clear our temps, cure polio (again), and a handful of other things, and repeat a few of them a few times.

Oh, and each thine you do something, go back into disk management to see if you can shave off a few megs of space. Keep shaving. Don't worry - it won't grow back thicker and fuller.....
 
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Solution
Blaise170

Blaise170

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Well this ended quite terribly. There was already nothing I saw taking up space as restore and backup were both off. I would have used WinDirStat but I didn't think about that until after the suggestion above. After resizing the partition, the MBR got corrupt and Windows couldn't repair it. I ended up getting the irql_less_than_or_equal BSOD and I've had to fully restore the PC.

Fortunately I didn't delete the HP partition so I was able to backup everything to a DVD and restore without the OS disc. I'm in the process of trying to reinstall and de-bloatware the PC. In a few weeks I should have access to my OS disc that I left at school so I'll try to just reinstall the full system again at that time.

Thanks anyways for the help.
 
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