Cloning a big drive to a smaller SSD

[TheGreatSatan]

Are there going to be any issues when cloning my wife's 500GB drive to a smaller 128GB SSD? She has maybe 70GB of data on the drive is all, so it'll all fit. I'm just not sure if the software will have any problems when the drives aren't the same size

Has anyone done it?

[Fuganater]

I've seen people talk about it. I think its hit and miss for issues. What software are you going to use to clone it? Acronis?

[AmEv]

One thing I did was boot into a Linux Live CD and simply do a file transfer from one disk to another.
Sure, all of the "hidden"/"system" stuff was lost (with the StartUp's system.ini launching on bootup), but with a bit of reconfiguring, it won't even notice a difference.

[slaveofconvention]

Another option, if cloning is the way you want to go, is to shrink the partition on the hard disk down so it will fit on the SSD, then when the clone is complete, extend the partition to fill the drive. Eg 500GB Partition, reduce to 70GB - clone to SSD - extend partion on SSD from 70GB to 128GB

[TheGreatSatan]

I'm starting to think a clean install would just be easier

[OvRiDe]

Might be.. but I know Ghost will do what you are wanting. The image is only the information stored and not the whole partition. I think Clonezilla (free) will also do that as well as long as there is only one partition on the drive you are copying.

[xr4man]

yeah, clonezilla takes a crap if you have more than 1 partition and are trying to resize one of them.

[Airbozo]

If you are running windows 7 or vista the OS has built in tools for resizing the partition;
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

Otherwise try this:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-resize-windows-partition-with-open-source-software.html

I personally run the defrag first to make sure nothing gets corrupted, but it may be an unnecessary step.