Cloning Windows 7 to new HD

[TheSloth]

Anyone have any experience with cloning a windows 7 installation to a new disk? This one is slightly complicated in that the disk is in two partitions, and overall is 500Gb and I want to clone to only a 120Gb SSD. I only need the C: partition (D: is manufactuers recovery partition), however I'm not sure how to make sure the thing boots normally without cloning the entire disk, which isn't possible in this case...

[grawk]

reduce the size using partition magic or something similar, then do a direct clone.

[TheSloth]

reduce the size using partition magic or something similar, then do a direct clone.

There's no issue doing a clone of the partition that I need, however as far as I understand cloning that partition itself directly to the new disk would not in itself make the new disk bootable? The only guaranteed way I know is to clone the entire disk block by block, and that is impossible due to space constraints even given partition resizing etc.

[HeadphoneAddict]

Do you have more than 120Gb of data on the 500Gb drive, so that you can't use partition magic to make it small enough to clone to the 120Gb?

Maybe you could clone the 500Gb to another 500Gb, then delete everything that you don't want to go onto the 120Gb SSD, then re-partition the new 500Gb to a smaller matching size, and then clone the remainder onto the SSD? (or likewise just move all the extra files to another drive as an archive, and delete them from the original which you will re-size)

I haven't cloned a Windows hard drive in a long time, but I own Acronis True Image software, and wonder if that might do the trick for you for moving down to a smaller drive. You could do some research into the new features of the 2012 version. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/?mid=4284&lid=2&uid=108688