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Cloning to smaller drive

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I have a 750GB internal drive that I use as a C: drive in a Windows 10 machine.  The drive has 3 partitions including an OEM partition, a boot partition and a file and data partition.  I have been cloning it (with True Image 2010) to a 640GB internal drive with no problems until recently, when after selecting the drive as Target Drive, I would get an error message saying the process failed after I clicked on Continue, or what ever the button says.

I upgraded today to True Image 2016.  When I attempt to clone, both drives appear.  After selecting the 750GB drive as Source, the 640GB drive appears grayed out and I can't select it as the Target.

As a test, I selected the 640GB drive as Source, the 750GB drive was available to select as a Target. Does this indicate that I have too much data on the 750GB drive to allow a clone to the 640GB drive?

 

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Walter, the general rule with cloning is that the target drive should be of equal or greater size than the source drive and have sufficient free space after all the source data is copied across.

If this has been working previously when using ATIH 2010 (Rescue Media) then I would recommend running a Disk Cleanup for your source drive to ensure that you are not holding copies of either an old version of Windows (7 or 8.1) that you have upgraded from to Windows 10, or a previous build version of Windows 10.  These copies can take up over 20GB of disk space that may make the difference here.

To run Disk Cleanup - right click on your C: drive and select Properties, then Disk Cleanup, wait while the initial scan of the disk runs, then on the next windows, click on the button for Clean up system files and wait again for a further more detailed scan to complete. Finally, in the new Disk Cleanup for Windows 10 (C) window, select all items which show very large values such as Old Windows installations etc.

If cloning still doesn't work, then providing that you have sufficient free space on the source drive, you could use the alternative Backup and Restore method to migrate the data from the source to the target drive, taking the option as needed to shrink your data partition on the target drive.

Thanks for the fast reply.  I will try your suggestions, probbly tomorrow, and let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the fast reply.  I will try your suggestions, probbly tomorrow, and let you know how it goes.