Step-by-step - cloning disk to smaller disk?
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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Hi all!
I've been trying for an hour to figure out the proper procedure for doing this, but haven't managed, despite doing a search on the forums, all the methods I've read don't seem to work as I get errors like "partition over disk size!" or "destination drive too small!"…..could somebody perhaps mind posting a step-by-step set of instructions for me? I would appreciate the assistance as I'm new to Clonezilla!
What I'm trying to do is this:
I've got a 120gb SATA drive in my mom's computer, and my brother just bought a new system. Currently, he's low on money (Student Loans!) and only has the 120gb IDE drive from his old computer. He is going to re-use that old 120gb IDE drive in his new system too. However - as mom really never uses her computer for more than just e-mail, Kijiji, some music, and the occasional YouTube video, she doesn't really need 120gbs of space, so I want to use my old 40gb Maxtor IDE drive in her computer instead and put the 120gb SATA in my brother's computer to give him a bit more space.
I've read that Clonezilla can clone a drive to a smaller destination drive as long as the space used on the current partition is less than the destination drive (In my case, mom's WinXP Pro install on her 120gb SATA drive is only using ~20gbs of space, which should certainly fit on the 40gb drive I want to copy it to)
Would would I go about doing this? (and I'd love to have a way to do it that changes absolutely nothing on the 120gb SATA so I still have it as a backup should the clone go amiss!)
THANK YOU for any help! :)
Hi,
just have a look at the Live doc section on this site, where there's a document explaining exactly what you're looking for:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/files/clonezilla_live_doc/CloningToSmallerDrive_0.1/
HTH,
Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Bordeaux
Thanks Jfnif!
A quick question though - in that tutorial, in the "3.1. First Method: Direct Cloning (Disk To Disk)" section, a warning states that:
"The direct cloning method shown here is highly risky: in case of source and target partitions
mismatch, the data will be irremediably lost."
I'm not sure I understand this…..does that mean data on the SOURCE disk can be permanently lost? If so, why? Isn't Clonezilla simply reading the data from the source drive and copying it to another? I can understand the section about resizing partitions potentially damaging data as the data is being manipulated in that part of the tutorial, but there are no warnings listed for that…? If the data is being read to be copied, in a partition-to-partition clone, why would the source disk's data need to be altered rather than read?
Another question as well - do partitions have to be already created on the Target drive when doing an disk1-image, image-disk2 clone as well?
Hi,
Msg #3. The danger I am emphasing is that in case of disk mismatch (IOW, if by error you setup the clone operation from Disk2 to Disk1 instead of cloning from Disk1 to Disk2), you completely override all the data of what would have been your source disk. Using disk cloning you must be double cautious.
Msg #4. Yes, the partition table must be preparred before the restoration (see chapter 2.2).
As a general hint:
- disk cloning/restoration doesn't require any partition on the target (you may use a brand new disk)
- partition cloning/restoration requires a partition table to be present on the target.
HTH,
Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Bordeaux