Cloned 340GB -> 128GB SSD. How did Acronis know to only reduce the C:\ partition ??

[GoodEnough]

Source disk had 3 partitions
A: 40MB
B: 14 GB
C: 285GB

Needed to copy entire drive to my new SSD drive. The destination drive only has 128GB so I wanted to simply compress partition C, since A & B had OS recovery data that could not be reduced. ie: Using the "proportional" resize would not be suitable.

I chose "exact copy" (not manual, not proportional) and somehow it knew to keep A & B their original size, and it reduced only C to make everything fit onto the 128GB SSD.

Clever trick! Without scanning the partitions, how did Acronis know that C was the partition that had all the unused space??

 

[DaveSimmons]

> Without scanning the partitions,

It probably did scan the partitions, at least the free space properties. It had to scan the disk to find out there 3 partitions, why would it stop there?

 

[GoodEnough]

Ok, so there could be a simple algorithm to take the space away from the partition with the greatest free space. Yea, I guess that's freely available without scanning the drive, just like when you do drive properties in Windows.

 

[soccerballtux]

this would be why I always click 'advanced', just to know

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Is it possible that Acronis just one-to-one copied the sectors of partitions A and B and, upon reaching partition C, realised there wouldn't be enough space on the new drive? And then it checked the unused space in C, realised it would fit on the new drive, and shrunk it before copying?

Maybe I'm talking out my rear end here, not too familiar. I use Clonezilla since it lets me force sector-by-sector copying (I deal with fully encrypted drives), it's free, and it's relatively easy to use. There are tons of menu options that I haven't explored yet, though.