HDD and SSD size problem

sorcerer

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A customer brought a desktop machine in and I discovered that the hard drive is on its way out so he decided that he wanted to replace it with an SSD instead of an HDD.

I tried to image the drive with Macrium Reflect but it kept throwing errors and failing, telling me to run chkdsk /r, but even after doing that it still kept failing with the same message, so I then tried Clonezilla which was successful and even verified everything as restorable.

The existing HDD is a WD 500GB and the new SSD is also a WD of 240GB. Clonezilla now says that it can't restore the drive because the new one isn't big enough, telling me that the source was 500GB but the destination is only 240GB - even though the actual image file itself is only 96GB because there wasn't much data on the original drive and it was mostly free space.

If there's a way to get Clonezilla to do this, would someone please be kind enough to tell me just exactly how, and I really do mean step-by-step because I really know nothing of how to use it other than just in the beginner default mode.

Thanks
 
I’d just find a spare drive that’s big enough. Use Clonezilla to restore the image. Then take THAT drive and use Macrium to clone it down to the smaller SSD.
 
I just had a similar problem with MR this past week, where it kept failing the clone because of errors on the source disk. Tried several times using different cloning software and tried unsuccessfully to clone it to a same-sized HDD as an intermediate step. Ended up backing up the user data with Fabs and doing a fresh install. If the drive has issues, that's the best option anyway. Otherwise you may just end up with a fast but buggy system.
 
I just had a similar problem with MR this past week, where it kept failing the clone because of errors on the source disk. Tried several times using different cloning software and tried unsuccessfully to clone it to a same-sized HDD as an intermediate step. Ended up backing up the user data with Fabs and doing a fresh install. If the drive has issues, that's the best option anyway. Otherwise you may just end up with a fast but buggy system.
That is how I feel.
I discovered that the hard drive is on its way out
That is the only shortcoming with Reflect. Bad drives will not image.
 
I just had success in the exact same scenario using the free version of Acronis that came with the SSD, in this case a Crucial drive. I first tried cloning with Acronis, which threw errors and failed. So instead I used Acronis to make a sector by sector backup image from the failing drive to an external - that restored successfully to the Crucial SSD. Simple as it is to just fresh install Windows and move the data over with Fabs, I always prefer a clone/system image solution for my clients when at all possible. It's just a lot easier for them to get their system back "exactly the way it was before, but working".

Truthfully, I haven't had much luck downsizing a drive with Acronis - the only software that works seamlessly for that seems to be the Samsung migration software, but that needs to be run from within Windows, and will always fail on a drive with errors. But the two step backup image approach, with a restore to the smaller SSD, was pretty quick and worked well.
 
We use a DDI machine or ddrescue to make a sector clone to a larger standard drive. Then we run chkdsk /f on the clone. Then use macrium to clone from the standard drive to the smaller SSD. This works often with drives with bad sectors.

edit/
under no circumstances, I would ever run chkdsk on a failing drive. It is like pulling rotten wood in a crumbling house to repair other rotten parts in the house.
 
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We use a DDI machine or ddrescue to make a sector clone to a larger standard drive. Then we run chkdsk /f on the clone. Then use macrium to clone from the standard drive to the smaller SSD. This works often with drives with bad sectors.
If I have to use my hardware imager (DFL-SRP) to image the drive because of bad sectors, the price goes up to my minimum for data recovery jobs ($150). You have to then run Macrium Reflect which doubles the time spent, all to end up with a system of questionable stability. In my case, there were no proprietary programs that would have been lost by a fresh install, just some freeware program he could readily re-install. He was so ho-hum about having to do that.
 
You need to change the cloning options in Reflect if you want to try to clone a failing drive, specifically you need to either unselect file system verification or use the 'forensic copy' option, which is a sector-by-sector copy. Intelligent Sector Copy is essentially a file-copy. So, understandably, it will struggle if there's an issue with the file system integrity.

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Yup, did that but still failed.
It probably found that the file system was too messed up to reliably copy in that case. Did you try a 'Forensic Sector Copy'?

Either way, if there's a file system issue it has to be fixed, whether that's before or after cloning (but not without backups on a failing drive of course). And I think that using something like Fabs, as you mentioned, is the safest option anyway.

I tend to pull the data off with Fabs (or manually) first, even if I plan to clone/image the drive with Reflect. But I have, on occasion, found that the drive has issues when I start to clone/image it. Since I already have a copy of anything important by then, I'll sometimes try running a chkdsk /f. At that point it's largely academic, since I'll already be planning a fresh install but I have found that Reflect often succeeds after chkdsk, even when the drive has issues.
 
I hate to admit it but I'll still use HDD Regenerator now and then in the right circumstance. Works every time. In all the years I've just never figured out how loosely it plays with questionable data. I'll usually run it before I HAVE to use chkdsk to reset a dirty bit on a drive as it won't reset dirty bits but does a much better job correcting errors and salvaging data. (I see the price has gone up.....)
 
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