In the past this would have been a trivial problem as I could have just used Disk Director Suite or True Image (both by Acronis), but unfortunately the versions I own are quite old and incompatible to my hardware and Win7.
So I was looking for a free solution to the problem and only found "shrink partition, copy, then restore to original size" as solution. How come there are so many open source programs for partition editing/copying, but none of them manages to apply the resize step to the cloned data instead of having to mess with the original partition?
Anyway, what I'm actually trying to do is copy my Windows 7 system partition on my notebook to the new SSD I installed. Unfortunately the SSD is much smaller than the original system partition, so the usual live CD tools (e.g. Clonezilla) won't work. GPartEd could resize the original partition, but I'd prefer not touching it until I know the cloned partition works as desired.
So, does anyone know a free tool (Windows or on a live CD) that can clone a partition to a smaller target disk?
So I was looking for a free solution to the problem and only found "shrink partition, copy, then restore to original size" as solution. How come there are so many open source programs for partition editing/copying, but none of them manages to apply the resize step to the cloned data instead of having to mess with the original partition?
Anyway, what I'm actually trying to do is copy my Windows 7 system partition on my notebook to the new SSD I installed. Unfortunately the SSD is much smaller than the original system partition, so the usual live CD tools (e.g. Clonezilla) won't work. GPartEd could resize the original partition, but I'd prefer not touching it until I know the cloned partition works as desired.
So, does anyone know a free tool (Windows or on a live CD) that can clone a partition to a smaller target disk?