Anyway to clone to an OS to a smaller drive.

[Insomniator]

Hey guys currently I have Vista 64 installed on a 120 gig partition in a 400 gig SATA drive.

My dad just gave me his 74Gb Raptor and I want to use it as my boot drive and use the 400 for everything else.

Installed Vista like two days ago and don't really want to install it again so I'd like to just clone it over to the raptor but my dad says that can't be done. I also can't get a hold of the Vista 64 DVD until next week so I'm hopin he's just outta date and wrong.

thanks

 

[Mr. Lennon]

Acronis

 

[taltamir]

forget acronis. Get clonezilla and gparted. Two free, open source bootable utilities. And they do a BETTER job then most commercial software in this regard.

1. Delete stuff until your OS drive (drive C) has less then 74GB... please adjust for the actual displayed size (74GB = 74,000,000,000 windows displays in GiB, gibibyte, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB)
2. Boot from the gparted CD, resize partition, this might take a little while (2 hours or so).
3. Boot from the clonezilla CD, do a direct drive to drive clone copy, this also should take 2 hours or so.
4. Unplug the old drive to make sure the new one is booting properly.
5. If everything worked, plug the old driveback in, and then use Gparted to delete the old 120GB boot partition on it, then resize the other one to take up the whole drive.

 

[Insomniator]

Well I resized the partition, and read that i would need to repair windows to get vista to boot correctly.

Now I also had Vista 32 installed on an IDE drive in the system, didn't touch anything with that. Windows repair showed Windows Vista on a 0 meg partition and and Windows on an 90 gig partition (Which happens to be Vista 32). Said I need to repair windows for it to boot correctly, and of course it repaired/recovered Vista 32 and now repair does not at all recognize the Vista 64 partition; nothing shows up when I disconnect the IDE drive.

On startup I have options for Windows Vista and Windows Vista (recovered), both of which are simply my old 32 bit install. When in windows I can see the resized 64 partition, with all the windows files and such, but that drive gives me a boot disk error.

I dunno what went wrong, why it repaired the untouched 32 bit install, or why it showed the resized Vista partition as 0 megs, but it looks like i'm waiting till monday to reinstall.

 

[QuixoticOne]

FYI in case it helps, Acronis True Image Home 11 is $10 for the download on sale now; I just bought a couple.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2227154&enterthread=y