Menu

Larger to Smaller Clone

Greg
2015-05-07
2015-05-10
  • Greg

    Greg - 2015-05-07

    First of all I don't have a problem. Just figured I'd Post this in case someone else had a similar issue.
    This issue can only occur if you want to clone from Larger to Smaller Disk.
    I have an Acer V5-171-6422 Laptop with a 500 GB Platter HD. I wanted to clone to a PNY 480 GB SSD.
    I knew I had to shrink the windows 8.1 partition to get it to fit so I shrunk it and had 5 partitions like this on my Western Digital 500 GB Drive.

    /dev/sda1/ 400 MB NTFS Recovery Partition
    /dev/sda2/ 300 MB fat32 EFI System Partition
    /dev/sda3 128 MB Unknown File System.
    /dev/sda4 240 GB Windows 8 (Shrunken Partition to try to get it to work with CloneZilla)
    FREE SPACE HERE LEFT FROM SHRINKING PARITION 4
    /dev/sda5 349 MB Acer Recovery Partition

    So I fired up CloneZilla and got "Partition 5 is too big for this disk." error.
    Using GParted I moved sda5 from the end of the disk to the left just after sda4 and sure enough CloneZilla worked!
    I could not perform the partition movement in windows. I needed GParted.

    I also did need to use advanced mode in CloneZilla with option -icds (skip checking destination disk size before creating partition table)

    The key thing to understand is everything at the end of the source disk needs to be shifted to the left to work with CloneZilla if cloning from Larger to Smaller disk.

    Other things I learned
    It turns out my disk is GPT so I started to wonder if the duplicate GPT Partition table that needs to be written to the end of the disk was the problem.
    It was not. CloneZilla does move this properly to the end of the smaller disk. Also AHCI mode in BIOS works fine with CloneZilla.

     
  • Steven Shiau

    Steven Shiau - 2015-05-10

    Cool! Thanks for sharing that.

    Steven.

     

Log in to post a comment.

MongoDB Logo MongoDB