BleepingComputer.com: Clone Bigger Hard drive to smaller hard drive

I have a 1TB hard drive that I am only using 30GB on and want to clone that to a 500GB hard drive. I have tried using Drive Image XML but it tells me that I have to get a bigger drive in order for it to work. My question is this, is there a program (free) that can clone a bigger hard drive to a smaller one?

I might be answering my question here but I wonder could I image the drive and the restore the image from that one to another one?

There has to be a way to do it.

uByte

This post has been edited by uByte: 21 May 2009 - 04:17 PM

The verdict is still out. I tried to image the drive and restore it to the smaller one and it gave me the same message. I wonder if I resized the partition of the bigger one to make it smaller then tried to copy it. That might work.

If anyone has done this before let me know.

uByte

try making a partition size you are happy with first,
then copy that to that after resizing the 30GB to what you think is reasonable...say 120GB ?


XML should do it.


OS ? problem ?

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Thats what I ended up doing. I resized the drive with Portable Partition Magic then ran Drive Image XML to clone the drive from one to the other.

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Not an OS problem more of a weird Hard drive problem. The hard drive was acting like it didn't have an OS installed when I booted it up. So I tried to reboot and low and behold it boots up fine. There would also be weird times where rebooting it wasn't able to fix it so I would have to reseat the memory to other slot to get it to boot. I have dealt with it for a while and decided it is about time to nip it in the butt. It might be a hard drive firmware update which is what I am going to check next but want to back up everything before I do it.

GREAT SUCESS! Worked just like a charm.

I will have to see if this fixes the problem entirely to early to tell right now.

uByte