Absolute clone?

Sagi3 · 19 Jun 2012 at 22:20

Hi All,

I have just taken delivery of a shiny new laptop. Yay me

I have a hdd caddy instead of a cd drive. In my old Vaio i have a 500gb hdd that i would like to swap for an old 80gb one so that the Vaio will become the wifes/kids to destroy (they have done a good job of that so far, hence why the new laptop lol)

I would like to, if possible, make an exact clone of the 500gb hdd (only around 50gb used) onto the 80gb one so that i can have a 500gb storage drive to run alongside the nice new ssd, and the 80gb one becomes the only Vaio hdd.

Is it possible to do this, including Windows etc, so that i don't have to mess around with re-installs etc?

Thanks in anticipation for your help.

Sagi3

xpcpu · 20 Jun 2012 at 01:21

i thought you had to have the same size or larger to clone, could be wrong.

best place to ask is 'storage drive' section of the forums

str · 20 Jun 2012 at 01:56

You can use something like Acronis True Image to do a backup of the contents of the 500GB drive to an image on an external HDD or network and restore it to the 80GB drive.

Sagi3 · 20 Jun 2012 at 23:52

str said:
You can use something like Acronis True Image to do a backup of the contents of the 500GB drive to an image on an external HDD or network and restore it to the 80GB drive.

Thanks

Purgatory · 21 Jun 2012 at 00:48

Agree Acronis True Image will do it great and will even expand a drive back to full usable size, so your 50GB of data will go onto your 80GB drive and it will expand the empty space back as usable drive space. It would do exactly the same if you were moving to a larger drive too.

Mercutio · 21 Jun 2012 at 15:04

There's plenty of backup options, Easeus do a variety of disk imaging tools as well (and is free). Paragon partition manager is free for home use, there's lots of options rather than paying for something.