ee_engineer

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I am trying to clone my windows 7 system partition (500GB total and 250GB used) which is on a 2tb drive to a 1tb drive. Windows restore from image does not seem to be able transferring to a smaller disk.
Would anyone have an idea on how to achieve this?

Any help is extremely appreciated, this thing has been driving me crazy for 2 days
 

monkeysweat

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I've tried and failed at it myself, in the amount of time you've been thinking about it, you could have installed the smaller drive, installed windows 7 and all your programs and transferred all your files.
Just install ONLY the drive you intend to be your OS drive, then install windows, then connect your other drives - if possible connect other drives after you install all your programs, too. Windows and SOME programs like to install important files on other drives and the only way around this is to only have 1 drive installed at the time
Windows likes to place the boot mgr on random drives it seems and if you have more than 1 drive installed, if you remove a non-os drive you have a chance of having a nonbootable system.
 

ee_engineer

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the main reason i decided not to go that route is because i have tons of documents and files put in so many different places, and i am positive i will not get everything if i were to copy it over, and setting up all my programs like i had them would surely take weeks.
If i cannot clone it, it truely would not be worth it (for me) to use the new disk as a boot drive.

thanks though
 
Try acronis true image clone utility.
You can download a 30 day trial for free.
I successfully cloned a larger drive that was partially used to a smaller ssd.
I liked the program enough so I bought it; that, of course, is the object of a free trial.
 

ee_engineer

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I am about to try Easeus. I already tried arconis, the problem with arconis is that you need to have the destination drive to be equal to or larger than the allocated space on the source drive. Currently, my external HD and source drive are almost completely filled up.
 

ee_engineer

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Easus did not work for me. I got a friends external drive to back-up my data, and deleted everything buy my system partition and program partition.
total space now used is 700GB everything else is unallocated space. Created a backup image of the C drive now, and tried to restore. Still fails.
I am truly stuck now. Any help?
 

ee_engineer

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I finally figured it out. These were problems i ran into:
I moved the data on my storage partitions from my hard drive to a friend's external. I then deleted those partitions. My HD looked like this:
[SYSTEM PARTITION 500GB] [UNALLOCATED SPACE 500GB] [PROGRAM PARTITION 100GB] [UNALLOC SPACE 700GB]. I tried the restore after that and it failed. I backed up my system partition to my external HD, and tried to restore. IT FAILED.

Next i repartitioned my HD so the allocated partitions are the first 2 partitions. I created an image of all my drives. Then restored the partition, AND IT WORKED.
I believe the unallocated space was taken into account in the partition table when creating the image.

Thanks for your help. I hope this saves the next guy 72 hours. (started monday at 6)
 

Branden

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huh, i've never had issue cloning partitions with easeus. but with that said i've never had a 2TB drive where only 600GB was used across 2 partitions separated by unused space. if you'd mentioned that you'd have gotten better help...
if you don't mind me asking, what do you think was the point of splitting your HDD like that in the first space?

glad you got it sorted out anyway.
 

ee_engineer

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I originally had only 200GB free on the 2TB. when backing everything up, I deleted the partition that was between the system partition and programs partition, so that is how that happened.
Sadly, i am not noticing lots of improvements with this new drive, and i still get the same WEI. new system drive is a spinpoint f3. old system drive was a hitachi 5400rpm.
edit: i did keep a steady 110MB/s transfer rate from my usb3.0 external.
 

monkeysweat

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WEI will only go above 5.9 with a raptor or SSD --- SSD will go into the 7's
you transfers and your access time should be better, but overall it won't be a huge difference.
a raptor isn't worth it and the SSDs are much more attractive, if you are looking at perfomance, you'll have to go that route, however you won't be able to fit everything on there, you may want to rearrange your documents, etc to be on a seperate partition to make the future move to an SSD doable.