Which partitions?

[sorcerer]

Got a Lenovo laptop in that has a 1TB HDD in that's going faulty.

It started life as a Windows 8 machine and the guy upgraded it to Win 10 a while ago. He doesn't have a lot of stuff on it so he's happy to have a 120GB SSD in it's place rather than a like-for-like swap. I know I can't clone a large disk to a small one so my plan was to image the relevant partitions and put them on the SSD.

Unfortunately, I've never seen a disk with 8 partitions before and given that it started as a Win 8 system and was upgraded to Win 10, I'm not sure just exactly which are the relevant ones that I need. I'm assuming that the 'LENOVO (G' partition will have recovery info for doing a factory reset for instance, which we don't need because if it ever needed it I'd just do a clean install of Win 10.

So, any pointers as to which partitions I need to image to the new SSD to get it up and running?

 

[Diggs]

If you are going to image then why wouldn't you do all of them? (...and yes you can clone large to small - use Macium) They are small and hardly take up any room. I''ve never had any luck deleting any partitions on a UEFI setup but haven't tried too hard. Personally I'd get rid of UEFI and set it up as a 2-partition drive with a fresh install of Win10.

 

[Porthos]

I would want to clean install but, I would DRAG the first 5 partitions to the new drive with Macrium.

 

[Porthos]

He doesn't have a lot of stuff on it so he's happy to have a 120GB SSD

I would do 240-256 instead.

 

[sorcerer]

DOH!! Yes, why didn't I think of that?

You can't clone a large disk to a small one but you can image as it only images the data doesn't it.

I'm going to blame it on my meds and/or trying to do four things at once and doing none of them correctly.

Thanks

 

[sorcerer]

Thanks very much folks, all noted and appreciated.

 

[Moltuae]

Personally I'd recommend a 250GB at least, for the sake of another £20-30.


Safest and easiest option is to copy all of the partitions; most of them are very small anyway. To enable you to resize the system partition (E), you'll need to unselect the partitions to the right of it before clicking on 'Copy selected partitions'. Then select the copy of partition E and click on 'Cloned partition properties' and resize the partition, leaving space for the remaining partitions. You should then be able to add (drag and drop) the remaining partitions. Your clone should then look just like the original drive, albeit with a smaller system (E) partition.

ETA: And yes you can clone to a smaller drive, as long as you let Reflect know which partitions to resize by manually adding/editing the partitions.

 

[Porthos]

Safest and easiest option is to copy all of the partitions; most of them are very small anyway.

Those last partitions include the original Win 8 recovery. Useless and wasted space. I backup the whole thing "just in case" but would only restore the ones I mentiond.

 

[Moltuae]

Those last partitions include the original Win 8 recovery. Useless and wasted space. I backup the whole thing "just in case" but would only restore the ones I mentiond.

True, but I'd probably still copy them. You can easily remove them later (and extend the system volume) should it become necessary. As I see it, the recovery partition belongs with the system. It enables the owner to perform a factory reset on the machine, should they wish to. I know that's an unlikely scenario but I would at least give the customer the choice. Recovery partitions were of course preceded by recovery discs, and I wouldn't have thrown a set of those away without first asking the customer.

Having said all that, in this situation I'd be more inclined to do a fresh install of Windows on the SSD anyway, keeping the old HDD intact to hand back to customer, complete with the original OS and partitions.

 

[mikeroq]

I regularly clone larger drives on to smaller SSDs without issue. Usually using Paragon HDM.

 

[fincoder]

You can't clone a large disk to a small one but you can image as it only images the data doesn't it.

Yes you can clone to a smaller drive, using pretty much any cloning software (I use Paragon). No need to image then restore the image, just directly clone. I've found that systems don't boot if I only select partitions that I think are needed, so I always clone the lot first (could be a limitation of my older Paragon Drive Copy Pro 15).

Cloning software should be smart enough to resize the large partition and leave all the other partitions intact. Afterwards I would remove the last three partitions to gain the space (extending the main partition into that area). Obviously make sure the system still boots before erasing the original drive, in case one of the removed partitions is required to boot.

 

[sorcerer]

Just to put this to bed - advice taken from you all and job done successfully onto a 240GB SSD. Thanks everyone and sorry for late reply.