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OS clone - larger HDD to smaller SSD. Maintaining SDD bootability.

I have a Dell desktop with Win 10 OS on a 1 TB hard drive (GPT). There is also a factory installed 256 GB m2. SSD (GPT) and I want to migrate OS to that. Currently using trial version Backupper Pro for demo. Plan to buy full version. I looked at the disks using Backupper Pro and using Win 10 Disk Mgmt.. See the screenshots. You can see that for the SSD disk Backupper sees a *: 15.98 MB unformatted partition and also 238.46 GB unallocated space. Win 10 Disk Mgmt only sees 236.46 GB unallocated space.

Total space used on the 1 TB hard drive is approximately 89 GB so a clone to the 256 GB SSD should be possible. AOMEI support implies System Clone is the best way to do this larger to smaller migration. But to do a System Clone I must choose either the SSD 15.98 MB partition or the 238.46 unallocated space. You cannot choose the entire disk. Which should I choose? (I understand to NOT use the sector by sector option.) My concern is that even though Win 10 Disk Mgmt does not show the 15.98 MB partition it still needs to be left as is in order make the SSD bootable. Or conversely, if left in place it will make the disk unbootable.

Is doing a Disk Clone an alternative route? I get to select the entire SSD disk instead of a single partition or space. Then I could use the Edit Partitions option to achieve the larger drive to smaller drive requirements. (The demo version does not show steps of how Edit Partitions will look.) Forum support implies this route will clone over Recovery partitions, whereas System Clone will not. However, it's not essential to me that the Recovery Partition be copied over to start with. I can do a workaround later on.

Thanks for any help!





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Comments

  • @Mercurius, You can use Disk Clone way to clone the whole Disk 0 to Disk 2. You don't need to manually edit partitions, AOMEI Backupper will edit partitions automatically to adapt to the small disk.
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