As an open source free software, Clonezilla can be used to clone or backup hard drive. Since it works with most of the operating systems largely used in company or home, many people love to use Clonezilla, especially when they want to upgrade hard drive with a new one. In this case, you can use Clonezilla to clone a hard drive to another without reinstalling Windows or installed programs.
However, the destination drive to replace the old one is not generally the same size or larger than the source drive. Since the excellent performance of SSDs and they have become increasingly cheaper recently, many users want to transfer data with Clonezilla from larger drive smaller SSD. If you happen to in this situation, you can make some extra efforts to get this done.
How to clone larger drive to smaller one with Clonezilla?
Officially, Clonezilla requires the destination partition to receive the clone to be equal or larger than the source one. Therefore, the only way to get this done is to shrink the source partition to fit the destination partition.
Clonezilla clone partition to new disk:
1. Open Disk Management in Windows 10/8/7. If you are running Linux system, you can boot your computer from GParted media.
2. Right click the source partition and click “Shrink Volume” and follow the wizard to shrink the partition.
3. When you get that done, reboot to Clonezilla.
4. Select the source disk and destination disk.
5. Choose EXPERT mode and enable the “-icds” option. You need to also choose the option”Resize partitional table proportionally” in one of the following menus.
6. Configure other Clonezilla options if needed and then type in “y” to confirm and start the clone.
In this way, you should be able to complete the cloning process without receiving the error like Clonezilla failed to create a partition table on this disk. However, if you think this is too complicated and cumbersome, you can try another freeware to clone from large disk to small one directly without extra preparation.
