How to Clone Windows with Clonezilla when the Destination Disk is Smaller than the Original – OR – Cloning a Large Drive to a Smaller SSD

I’ve done this dozens of times now over the last couple of years when it comes to swapping out workstation hard drives with SSDs and it’s pretty much become second nature at this point, but I think the world could use a good write up on this because I’ve wasted countless hours acquiring this knowledge.

So, for today’s lesson, we will be cloning a Windows 8.1 installation from a 500GB desktop hard drive onto a 250GB SSD. Basic knowledge of how to use tools like the command line and Disk Management are assumed. Continue reading “How to Clone Windows with Clonezilla when the Destination Disk is Smaller than the Original – OR – Cloning a Large Drive to a Smaller SSD”

Manually Restore a Clonezilla Image When Destination Partition is Smaller than the Original

Today I ran into some problems with a hard drive that failed in a machine and I needed to restore a Clonezilla image. Unfortunately, the destination partition happened to be smaller than the original image so I couldn’t use the wizard because it errored out claiming I needed to use the -C option. The only problem is that from within the wizard you don’t even have the option to use it. After some searching, I found a few sites that said to use partclone.restore -C -s – -o /dev/(path to partition) and that failed everytime but at least pointed me in the right direction. To make a long story short, here’s a lil’ somethin’ somethin’ that should accomplish our end goal. From the shell, do one of the following:
Continue reading “Manually Restore a Clonezilla Image When Destination Partition is Smaller than the Original”