Cloning boot drive to smaller drive

[theblackhole25]

I currently have a 1TB boot drive, but I'm only using ~90GB of it (recently built system). I've been looking into SSD drives and was wondering if there was a way to clone my boot drive to a smaller SSD drive (say 128GB). I just want to be able to make the clone and then swap the drives out to boot from the smaller SSD. I've used software in the past to make clones but they've required that the target drive be larger than the destination drive. Is there any kind of free or cheap software that can accomplish what I need? Are there any issues I should look out for? I'm really interested in making the SSD leap but if I can avoid sitting through all the installations again, all the better!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Most cloning software can't do this, but you can resize the partition to something smaller, say 100Gb, then clone it to the SSD.

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

 

[WyomingKnott]

On the one hand, two of the three clone apps that I use can do this for you. On the other hand, cloning an OS to an SSD is a deprecated method. A clean install is strongly recommended, to ensure that the alignment is correct, the correct drivers (like AHCI) are present, and the proper settings for an SSD are in place. If you just clone, you probably won't even get the TRIM command and your SSD performance will degrade over time.

EASEUS partition master, free version, can shrink your partition. Then again, so can Disk Management in Win7.

 

[theblackhole25]

On the one hand, two of the three clone apps that I use can do this for you. On the other hand, cloning an OS to an SSD is a deprecated method. A clean install is strongly recommended, to ensure that the alignment is correct, the correct drivers (like AHCI) are present, and the proper settings for an SSD are in place. If you just clone, you probably won't even get the TRIM command and your SSD performance will degrade over time.

I see. You bring up some points I hadn't thought about. Now I might have to reconsider this idea. Thanks!

 

[niente0]

Hi all,
I used this freeware utility and it did the job!!! I made a backup of my Linux mailserver with absolutely no problems!
A real byte-to-byte copy, and it works also on smaller destination disks.

http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P22/Raw%20Copy