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Question

How to clone from a 2TB drive to a 1TB drive?

Jun 19, 2015 4:41AM PDT

I have a 2TB existing drive and I want to use a new 1TB SSD. So far all attempts fail because I can't clone or do a system image from a source disk bigger than the new one. Is there a work around?

I have tried to "Shrink" the volume but Windows tells me it is not shrinkable. Are there third party products that can do it?

Thanks,


Bob

Discussion is locked

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Answer
What's the purpose of what you want to do?
Jun 19, 2015 6:07AM PDT

Certainly not just for backup use.

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Answer
Try Easeus Partition Master
Jun 19, 2015 6:09AM PDT

Assuming you have less than 1 TB used on the 2 TB drive, you should be able to partition that drive, and then clone the smaller partition.
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Good luck.

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Fixed - I had to repartition into two 1TB drives
Jun 22, 2015 6:09AM PDT

This is what I did. I downloaded and used Paragon Partition Manager to repartition the hard drive into two 1TB drives and then used Acronis to clone it.

There were a couple of strange things.

1. When I split them I was able to boot up from the new drive that had Win 7 and I then created a system image. When I booted from the Windows rescue disk and tried to restore the image it gave me the "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found" error. That was the same error message I got when trying to restore the original image from the 2TB drive to the new 1TB drive. This should have worked since the new drives were the same size. So, I had to try option 2.

2. Acronis True Image is the software that came with the Crucial SSD. I decided to clone the disk. But, not obvious at all is that the new drive must be installed on the computer and the old drive connected via a USB port for the cloning to work. You have to boot with the Acronis rescue disk to begin the cloning process which took about eight hours.

So, after almost three days I am done. In those three days I installed/reinstalled the new SSD and old drive three times, did three procedures that took almost eight hours each.

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BTW - repartitioning was a scary process
Jun 22, 2015 6:12AM PDT

The repartitioning process was very scary. You set the process up and reboot and the software takes over. The process took almost twelve hours even though the counter was counting down from roughly "Four hours left"

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Good job, now my question.
Jun 22, 2015 10:43AM PDT

If you had to do it again, would you do it the same way?

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I'd do it the same way but without Paragon
Jun 23, 2015 6:55AM PDT

There is no other way to do it other than to repartition. Given that I probably wouldn't use Paragon again. I found it cludgy and scary, especially the countdown timer that was woefully inaccurate. At one point it was stuck at "One hour eighteen minutes left" for over an hour. I thought it had crashed and almost pulled the plug but decided to let it run over night.

Acronis did good job of the system restore, but again it took a long time. Again it was not obvious that the source disk had to be connected via USB and the target disk actually installed in the computer. Very counter intuitive.

My five minute boot time has gone to just over a minute and all disk activity is lightning fast so it was a good thing to do.

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Answer
I bought this.
Jun 19, 2015 7:50AM PDT
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Answer
I have an idea..
Jul 9, 2015 8:50PM PDT

I also have an idea on a third party product :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00LN0GX4I/

The key is : have you figured out the definition of "clone " you want to express here ?

If you wish to copy all the data (the files, format,etc. ) of your 2TB drive to a 1 TB drive, I personally advise to make sure the size of data on your 2TB drive is less than 1 TB. Otherwise you will lose part of data when you completely operate the clone. I think that's why some posters advise you to shrink the source drive.

We generally choose a target drive of larger capacity or at least the same capacity to ensure the data safety.