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Is it possible to clone from a bigger drive to a smaller one?

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Hello Bob,
It is possible to clone a larger disk to a smaller one, provided that the smaller hard disk has enough capacity to fit the contents of the larger disk. You haven't told us which version of ATIH you are using, but the following KB articles should help. Whether laptop or desktop, the same premise applies.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/2931

https://kb.acronis.com/content/34881

This is what I did. I downloaded and used Paragon Partition Manager to repartition the hard drive into two 1TB drives (a scary process that took about twelve hours!) and then used Acronis True Image (V14) to clone it.

There were a couple of strange things.

1. When I split them I was able to boot up from the new drive that had Win 7 and I then created a system image. When I booted from the Windows rescue disk and tried to restore the image it gave me the "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found" error. That was the same error message I got when trying to restore the original image from the 2TB drive to the new 1TB drive. This should have worked since the new drives were the same size. So, I had to try option 2.

2. Acronis True Image is the software that came with the Crucial SSD. Using the Knowledgebase article noted above, I decided to clone the disk. But, not obvious at all is that the new drive must be installed on the computer and the old drive connected via a USB port for the cloning to work. You have to boot with the Acronis rescue disk to begin the cloning process which took about eight hours.

These words are in that KB article and they should be MUCH more prominent (!) The important point to remember is that you need to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Only after this you may do the cloning. Otherwise you will not be able to boot from the new cloned drive. I am not a newbie by any stretch and it was not obvious at all that I couldn't connect the new one via USB and clone from the working computer.

So, after almost three days I am done. In those three days I installed/reinstalled the new SSD and old drive three times, did three procedures that took at least eight hours each.