Possible to transfer a partition over to a smaller drive with clonzilla?

Question

I've used clonezilla once in the past to make a backup of a drive. I never had to use the backup so this is my question.

I have a current Windows install on a 500gb drive that I would like to transfer to a 250gb drive. The total space used on the drive is less than 250gb.

So what would I need to do to completely transfer one partition to the other drive?`

Answer 1

while Ghost Enterprise has no problems with cloning to a smaller target drive/partition (provided the used disk space does not exceed the target size), with Clonezilla you'll have to resize the source partition first to make it smaller or equal (but NOT larger) than the target drive.

Answer 2

I just went through something like this yesterday. Was cloning a bunch of machines that were all identical hardware except for varying sizes of drives...

As Molly suggests, I first shrunk the "master" machine's boot partition (GParted rocks!) to be the smallest of the lot and then cloned the drive. Clonezilla had no issues writing it out to same size or larger drives. Then I used GParted to re-embiggen the larger partitions as necessary.