difficulty backing up and restoring a partiti

[jeremy williams]

I'm attempting to backup a partition, with the intent of restoring it to a different hard drive.   If the source is an 80 Gig partition on a 500 gig drive, I cannot get it to restore to a smaller drive, say 250 Gigs, despite that the partition size should easily fit onto the disk.

Are there some options I'm missing when attempting to backup or restore?  We're talking about NTFS, and a partition containing a Windows 7 install.   No other data or partitions on the drive, so I'm backing up MBR data and so forth.

Thanks,

[Fuchs]

Clone to a smaler drive

Generally you cannot restore an image to a smaller drive.
But you can optimize your windows partition and minimize to use clonzilla.

In summary, it can be stated that you have (an example):
-an external usb drive (750GB or more) for backup and clonezilla images
-a windows (USB)start disk (made with sys a: or so)
-a possibility to start from USB (BIOS settings)
-a 'GPartet live' USB stick to investigate and change the partitions of drives
(you have made it bootable from this usb stick \utils\win32\makeboot.bat)
-a 'systemrescuecd.iso' or so
-naturally clonezilla live

You have made:
-a normal backup for your important data
-separate images with clonezilla for your 500GB and 250GB drives
_________________
#
with the details:
Start Clonezilla in standard mode
device-image
local_device
.. please insert an USB device .. or an unused HDD
Then you can see (example)
sda1 vfat_Winre #diag for Win_7 recovery
sda2 ntfs_Win_7 #boot
sda3 ntfs_Data
sda5 ext4_Ubuntu12.04
sdf1 vfat USB_Flash_Drive ->to save a whole disk image for sda1,sda2,sda3,sda5

sdf1 repository
Which directory is for the clonezilla image ..
/ Top_directory-in_the_local_device # use this
firstFolder Aug-20
secondFolder Sep-30

Beginner mode: Accept the default options
save_local-disk as an image
savedisk: Input a name for the saved image to use
2012-10-30-14-img
(*special note! Do not change to
     Y:\disk\2012-10-30-14-img  # it is a linux program)
_________________

-copy your audio und video files to an other disk

-optimize your windows 80GB partition with Windows-Defrag and with FDO Disk Optimizer for NTFS (!)

  (http://www.chip.de/downloads/Disk-Optimizer_32196509.html)

-minimize this partition with 'GParted live'

-make the partitions at 250GB a litle bigger than the new partitions in 500GB
-then you can save and restore with clonezilla

Good luck!

[Steven Shiau]

You can refer to:
http://drbl.org/faq/fine-print.php?path=./2_System/25_restore_larger_disk_to_smaller_one.faq#25_restore_larger_disk_to_smaller_one.faq

Steven.