Windows 7 reinstall prior to partition shrink and clone to smaller SSD

Thanks for the advice. I probably won't have time to do this until this weekend, so I still would have open ears if anyone else has other thoughts. I'll post back once I get everything done to summarize my experience and round out the thread.

I finally got things sorted out with moving to a new SSD. I'll post what I think I should have done do everything as easily and correctly as possible in this post and will post all of my mistakes in the next post.

Here is what I should have done from the beginning, but didn't know to because this info was pieced together from many online articles, blogs, and forums.

Here are two blog posts that got me going in the right direction:
http://www.brandonchecketts.com/archives/how-to-shrink-a-partition-with-unmovable-files-in-windows-7
http://jsm-techblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/using-clonezilla-to-clone-from-larger.html

1. Shrink the system partition immediately after re-installing Windows on the original HDD using Gparted or Windows Disk Management.

a. Notice and record the order of the partitions, their sizes, and which is the boot partition

b. I liked using Gparted over Windows because it allows moving of the partitions instead of only resizing
them.

2. Use Clonezilla to save the local partitions as an image to my external hard drive. Use the Beginner option

3. Use Gparted to create a partition table with the partitions in the correct order and large enough to restore the
imaged partitions

a. Create your partitions several GB larger (at least for the system and recover partitions) than the sizes
you recorded in step 1. For the small partitions, several MB larger (around 50MB) was enough for me.

i. Remember to flag the correct partition as the boot partition.

b. Place the partitions on the disk so that the unallocated space is immediately adjacent to the system partition
so you can easily expand it later.

i. I don’t know if I could have just made the system partition as big as I wanted it before restoring the
partition.

4. Use Clonezilla to restore the partition images to the local disk. Use the Beginner option.

5. Boot with Windows repair disk straight off or attempt to boot and then insert disk

a. Allow CHKDSK to run

6. Boot Windows and expand partition to the desired size or set up a new personal data partition.

Feel free to make suggestions or comments on my experience.

FYI, This was WAY more work than I thought it would be and what most of the common tech site guides make it out to be. A lot of my troubles probably could have been avoided by moving to a larger HDD instead of a smaller SSD.
I probably wouldn’t have even “upgraded” to an SSD this had I known it was this much trouble except I had already purchased and opened it. Either way, I learned a lot and hopefully someone else will learn from this thread.

First, it was a bit of a process shrinking my system partition after the fresh windows install on my old HDD. If you let Windows run through its initial series of updates (on mine there were 119 updates to install after first boot) it will place unmovable system files on the disk preventing. This prevented me from shrinking the partition anywhere close to what I needed. I also had installed CCleaner to remove bloatware, so that may have also had something to do with it. I know there are ways of finding these files and moving them to allow the shrink, but that was way over my novice head. So, I reinstalled, again. After this I still couldn't shrink the partition as small as I wanted. Turns out you need to disable system restore points and virtual memory. This allowed me to shrink the partition all the way down to 50GB.

To disable system restore point: Start menu>right click Computer>Properties>Advanced System Settings>System Protection (tab)>Configure (button)> select "Turn off system protection"

To turn off virtual memory: Start menu>right click Computer>Properties>Advanced System Settings>Performance settings (button)>Advanced (tab)> Virtual memory Change (button)>Uncheck automatically manage paging files size>select "No paging file"> click OK

Next, I deviated from my original plan and tried to restore a system image using the Windows repair disk. FAIL.....Can't restore a system image to a hard drive that is smaller than your original one. I also later found out you can't do this with Clonezilla either, even with shrunken partitions.

The solution to that problem is to load Clonezilla and use the "saveparts - Save_local_partitions_as_an_image" option. Choose the beginner option instead of the expert, unless of course you are an expert. Then you need to restore partitions to your new HDD or SSD using the "restoreparts - Restore_an_image_to_local_partitions" option in Clonezilla.

After doing this successfully to my external HDD I discovered I had not formatted the partitions to my SSD and had to use Gparted to format my drive multiple times. I probably should have used Gparted initially to shrink my partitions. I would have discovered that the boot partition on my factory formatted HDD was not sda1, but in fact sda2 and the recovery partition was sda3. sda1 & sda4 were very small partitions (100 & 200 MB) with HP installed programs. I did not notice this fact in the Disk Management program in Windows but later looked and noticed that information was there.

Once I got the partitions sized correctly I was able to restore the partitions using Clonezilla. I had to then use Gparted to flag the correct partition as the boot partition because I had previously flagged the incorrect one.
After this, I had to use the Windows 7 system repair disk to repair the startup options for Windows. Windows then ran CHKDSK a couple of times before booting normally.

Then I discovered I am not able to extend my system partition to use the unallocated space because the recovery partition is in the way. So, back to Gparted to move the recovery partition to the far right of the disk and expand the system partition. I know I could have set up a new partition in the unallocated space for my personal data, but at this point I was just ready to be done and have things back to normal.