How to Clone a Large Hard Drive to Smaller SSD

[@joshz9230]

With Macrium when cloning a drive to a smaller drive you can let Macrium handle the shrinkage automatically. When you get to the "Copy Partition" question you have two options: 1. "Exact partition offset and length" or 2. "Shrink or extend to fill the target disk" choose number two. I have used this on several occasions without issue going from a larger drive to a smaller drive assuming that the actual data does not exceed the drive capacity.

[@NoCluYT]

This tutorial is great. I'm doing it for someone with a ridiculously slow hard drive, so this upgrade will basically be a night and day difference.

[@WillKruger]

Thank you so much for doing this video. It was very helpful switching my laptop HDD to a smaller SSD. Thank you!

[@sbkchess5505]

Man? Thanks for the value you added, i just bought 512gb ssd and followed you exactly how you did it. and my HP is faster than i thought..

[@onienlol]

Great tutorial, Went from a 2TB NVME to a 256GB NVME, reason for this is because I dont use the 2TB in my laptop that much at all so I wanted to downgrade it and put the 2TB inside my PC.

[@Grim0954]

Completed in 5 minutes 16 seconds without any problems, thank you. 🥳 I have to change boot priority because I'm keeping the TB in the PC. 😉

[@Mightea]

I want to high five you. I didn't need the shrinking portion for mine but everything else, I was able to follow without a hitch. Thanks!

[@joaquinmoreno8213]

You're the man. Followed the tutorial and it worked like a charm!! I had bought the laptop of my dreams, I do multimedia, an Alienware 17 R. The hard drive was always at a 100% so it was useless, hope this fixes the problem with a new SSD drive.

[@mdd1963]

SSDs became pretty much mandatory since prices fell to reasonable in about 2015, 2016...; night and day difference!

[@adewaleobaro2081]

This is the most simple and effective way I found on youTube. You saved my life from 24 hours stress

[@zaimhanafi97]

for those who seeking the free version. just download the older versions. it works for me al least

[@richardpulitjr8826]

You are the MAN! Bought a Crucial 500GB SSD to replace my 1TB HDD on a 5 year old HP laptop. Was told to use Acronis software to clone but wasn't aware you had to make partition changes before cloning due to the drives having different capacities. Crucial's tech support is in India and I could not understand what they were saying because of the strong regional dialect. After many failed search attempts, I found your KZbin video and it worked like a charm! Thank you for sharing your knowledge of computers and the simple step by step guide you created on this video.

[@richneil5819]

Just what I was looking for. Thank you!

[@erichepperlewp]

#UPDATE: Macrium Reflect is no longer free -- this video was published 6 months ago and in that time, they have change it to not be free. kzbin.info/www/bejne/jqbKeISEmrN0rLc

[@ariesrising7257]

Great video!! Just the facts...nicely done!

[@Fred7038]

I just installed a 1 TB Hard drive in my pc. I partitioned it in half roughly and installed windows 11 . I want to copy my my windows 10 onto the second half of the hard drive. I downloaded the trial but I only want to clone the windows 10 to the second half of the drive and have a dual boot Windows 10/11 off of the new drive. Every time I go through the clone steps with just the new partition selected it looks like it wants to use the whole drive and just not the partition. Is there anyway to make it go just to the partitioned area? Thanks

[@alleywatch22]

Followed your video exactly and it worked like a charm, was previously getting a cloned failed error 8 message but not any more, cheers 😂

[@Marcus-ev8jx]

why is it that when i click next, i get an error message saying the target disk has an "incompatible sector size for this operation"?

[@themenon]

Thank you for this. Does this process work for windows 11?

[@Thunder_RTX]

I’m cloning the disk from 700GB WD HDD to SP 512GB SSD. I shrinked the 700GB HDD to 465GB so its equal to the ssd size. But, when I try to clone it, at 59% it gives an error code 9. Please help me!

[@dhilipkumarganeson390]

@thunder_rtx . Same to me getting error code 9 at 49%. Did you managed to get cloned after that?

[@Erikku-Sama]

It worked like a charm. Thank you mate.

[@jacklabloom635]

Extremely helpful. Thank you.

[@ezekielgskeen8607]

awesome understandable info video, thank you so much! salute to from UK 🔥

[@realcartoongirl]

why not use the optical bay as a hard drive with a optical to 2.5 adapter?

[@IansTech]

My friend wanted to keep the optical drive.

[@GavinKuo]

I want to say thank you! This video saves a lot of my time!

[@iSaucyy_Boii]

Is there any way to like take half my storage or just whatever I want and transfer it from hdd to ssd? Like windows and games?

[@arttheseven5526]

7:22 I had to use shrink even though I have already shrunk the 1tb windows partition to 250gb... Yep "shrinking" also worked. Also bought a new sata to usb3 adapter. Now the laptop is super fast. Before the bottleneck was the hdd/ram, now its the cpu. 😂

[@gr_nic]

10:26 everything worked fine until right about this point, I tried to extend my partition to take over the extra space but it wouldn't do it without converting the disk to dynamic first. So now my new drive is dynamic and i found out i can't change it back without completely clearing it of all data...I've seen many opinions on whether having a dynamic disk is bad or not. Luckily the disk is only a data/game storage disk without an OS on it and i still have the old harddrive. My question is, why did it ask to convert to dynamic and is having the disk set as dynamic a bad thing in the long run?

[@shaunprashanttharmarajan528]

It asked to convert to dynamic because most likely your unallocated space was not located beside your main windows partition. You can only extend main windows partition to unallocated space that is located directly beside it. If the unallocated space is not beside, you need to move it around. Aomei Partition Assistant free can do this.

[@truegent68]

This helped me a lot, thanks

[@Trueno102]

Use shrink or extend to fill new ssd if you cant shrink it to size. Im copying to a 250gb ssd and the 1tb hard drive would only shrink 56gb but still showing 900gb.

[@JosephKarthic]

Thankyou so much ,, this is the only method that works so easily, we are tricking the system by unallocating space and make the target disk look like the exact replica of source disk, Genius solution...

[@simtonicc]

I'm getting errors it keeps stopping at 5% and then a pop up says what u want to do with this drive and then the drive dissappears (the one being cloned)

[@alexgreis]

I had trouble with Macrium Reflect too. Instead, I used Aomei Backuper and all is fine.

[@Roijun17]

So my windows os will be moved to my ssd after cloning?

[@PrashanthS1992]

worked perfectly. thanks!

[@Ironsja11]

Excellent, thank you sir!

[@thewaterheaterfactory]

Great video I have a question so I have the same problem with the laptop older much older, but I’m going in the other direction so I bought an SSD hard drive that’s 2 TB and I’m removing the current hard drive that’s 569 GB. I’ve already cloned it and installed it, but the problem is I have no more room left on my: drive which is causing my computer to run horribly I need to expand the partition of my drive by utilizing the extra available space on the new 2 TB hard drive. Is it possible to do that without damaging all the files that are on that drive? So it’s already cloned and installed. It’s running much faster which is great but I still have not enough hard drive space space on my sea drive issues, plus I’m not utilizing the remaining terabytes. Thanks for your help.

[@thewaterheaterfactory]

Oh I see I can definitely do it. I just need to expand the volume on my new hard drive. Got it. Thanks again for your help. Can I do this in disk manager in Windows or do I need third-party software?

[@IansTech]

You can do this with windows disk manager to expand it

[@LoraxPendragon]

I tried this method, but the in use system files did not get transferred to the new ssd. Any ideas on how to solve this? I tried using minitool partition wizard, but it would freeze every time after transferring 55.53mb after it reboot to transfer system files.

[@TP_1987]

ขอบคุณมากครับ Thank you for your guid, easy to follow and quick to under stand.

[@petardragicevic1612]

What if u have partition C and D does that make any diffrence

[@hugozapata1298]

Great video!! Very clear and to the point, it helped me a lot! Thank you !!

[@1420MHZ]

I'm trying to clone a 1TB drive (only 48GB in use, rest is free space) onto a 256GB SSD and try to shrink the volume, it says I can only shrink it by 32GB so the new size would still be 900+ GB.. It said this was due to unmovable data being located at certain location on the drive blah blah so I'm trying to defrag the drive.. How lame...

[@1420MHZ]

Well, defragging made no difference BUT if I individually moved all the partitions then moved the C: drive last, it auto-adjusted the free space and I was able to clone the drive successfully.

[@zaimhanafi97]

thank you very much. I love you

[@dwj3005]

Would this cord work for the ps3 console. plug into ps3 console to copy save data to ssd.

[@romrom4597]

Can i format the HDD? So it will become empty?

[@iCOGNiTOSHiNOBi]

Getting blue screens and error message and changed bios order no luck help please

[@1337FaJa]

Hey man, don't know if you're still active, but your video was very informational. My problem is, that I can't shrink my volume ver much, just by like 200GB. I need to shrink my 1,9TB to 0,9TB and it is somehow impossible. I only have like 400GB of stuff on my drive.

[@zaimhanafi97]

same problem

[@vikingvisigoth4384]

I have a 5mb difference and the wavelink cloner dock won't let me do it.

[@toddwmac]

Thanks man. My Shrink function only does a small part of the drive. it is a 500g drive but the C: is only about 50G. Shrink only frees up about 70 gig. I've run the optimizer in Win 11 to relocate sectors, but no improvement in the Shrink option. Any ideas? Thanks a ton!

[@Trueno102]

Use shrink to fit option. It worked for me.

[@donens9310]

There does not appear to be a free version anywhere. Tried your link and nothing appears for free. Tried a couple different trial versions and all have limitation tied to disk cloning and your video. Any ideas?

[@IansTech]

I did not realize they were taking the free version completely away. I do see it available here. m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/macrium_reflect_free_edition.html

[@OShackHennessy]

It’s not supported anymore but still works fine for now.

[@steventherrien3854]

I cannot clone the drive…error 0…0x8004230f…do you know how to solve that ?

[@dbmrktr]

Thank You! Very helpful. Old PC is so much more responsive with SDD and additional RAM!

[@rpatel9901]

why do you have to select partitions exact fit? doesnt selecting clone copy them over to the ssd at the same sizer ie exact fit?

[@kocreeper2438]

welp my case is diff in the partition manager, it shows that my (c) drive partition is 100% used and no free space left. but when i go to file explorer, the (c) drive folder only took 20% of my 1tb hdd. from what i see, it says smth abt bit locker. i dont understand much abt bit locker but this channel might help if u ask them. ok going back to the shrinking partition, by shriking thr partition, it could now make space manually for my clone disk software to clone available partition to my new ssd. i suck ass at explaining so i hope u understood 😅😅🤣

[@rpatel9901]

did mine a year ago but from what i recall it was possible to change the partition sizes using Macrium reflect software. What i did was to run the disk cleanup in windows first and deleted things like windows restore files and old win update files etc and also manually backed up important files to my NAS then cloned it

[@Coolmaaaaaan]

I want to clone 256gb hdd to 120gb ssd, when I go into disk management I can only shrink 31gb.. what do I do?

[@imeprezime1069]

Buy bigger ssd

[@jesus3lovesyou]

Thank you so much bro❤❤

[@twidieeeeeeee]

I have windows 11 and I tried this but it did not work it always says cloning failed. 😞

[@markbick3896]

Same here

[@Finzzys]

If I clone this, All my apps,files, windows will be on the new ssd?

[@IansTech]

Yes everything exactly as it is now

[@kamoteman7002]

do i need to format my old hdd after cloning it if i use it as a secondary drive? sorry for my english thankyou

[@IansTech]

If you want to use it as a secondary I would format it and then you can assign it as a letter or use it as a portable drive if you wanted

[@manojpradhan943]

Hey, I think your video is my last hope. Nothing else is working. Just one question. If I just clone all the important windows partitions from my HDD ( size accumulating upto 1 TB) onto my new SSD ( 512) GB using your method, there won't be any issues right ? As long the original data can fit inside 512 GB, the new SSD will become bootable after this process, correct ?

[@wsadewo]

What about hard drive 1TB has 2 drive let say C and D?

[@FuFuFaFa1945]

thank you so much

[@winfuture9814]

I recently rebooted my laptop so there is no Important files on my laptop. Is this process still necessary?

[@felodp10]

No, this is only necessary if you want to copy all the disk's data

[@codykorzenowski6888]

What if my hdd is taking up more storage than the SSD I just got? I just want to put the operating system and some apps so I can use it as a boot drive

[@uzogaming3456]

thanks

[@55peterf]

Hi great tutorial. However my desktop 1tb drive with 750gb free space will not shrink small enough to clone to a 500gb ssd and despite less than 250gb of used space it will only shrink to 490gb or so.. Any clues?

[@IansTech]

Do you have other partitions on the drive that are taking up space like a recovery partition?

[@55peterf]

@@IansTech Hi Ian . no other partitions. I thought I needed to shrink the drive small enough to clone the smaller drive but Macrium sorted it for me when I dragged and dropped the system reserved and windows 7 partitions over.

[@IansTech]

@@55peterf excellent glad it got sorted!

[@chocoghost]

What did you do with the old drive? I'm using my old drive as storage but it still has the partitions and some windows artifacts I can't delete

[@IansTech]

I keep them as spares. I would wipe it completely if you want to keep it as storage, just needs to be formatted correctly to work with Windows (or whichever OS you want to use it with)

[@chocoghost]

@@IansTech do you have a tool recommendation? I can't seem to wipe some partitions from disk manager

[@OShackHennessy]

@@chocoghost to wipe the disk type diskpart in search bar and it will bring up disk partition. Type list disk and it will give you all of the available drives on your pc by labeling them disk 0, disk 1, disk 2 etc. you won’t know which is which so you have to check them all. To do this type “select disk 0” and enter. It will select that disk for you. Next type “detail disk”. It will list all the details of each disk and you can just keep going through them with select and detail. Once you identify the correct disk make sure you have it selected with the “select disk *add number here*” command. When you are sure you have the correct disk type “clean”. It will unformat the disk such that when you go back into disk manager it will start you as a brand new disk. It’s actually very easy even though it may sound complicated.

[@bartypants]

Thanks for the tutorial, that was great.

[@smika710]

i miss when these drives were that cheap

[@mrbrown6421]

Dialog: MapAndValidateXML Failed. Wonder what that means... Anyway, yes, the clone is fine. Thanks!

[@Winamp_]

Do i need be online connected to internet when doing the cloning and running the software? Or can I be offline when I do the cloning part? this is something I always wondered

[@IansTech]

You do not need to be online for the clone. The only time it would need to be online is if the application needed an update but doing a clone does not require internet.

[@Winamp_]

@@IansTech Thank you Ian, I appreciate it my dude. Greetings from Swe!

[@Ralph_Baric_PhD_C2019]

@@IansTech i am a noob, have given clonzilla a bit of a try, must be same size disk or larger etc. Must be booted from a usb drive etc. How does macrium handle running on the operating system that is being cloned? Isnt that a bad ides?

[@M_X1]

Great vid

[@cees-gc8xt]

thats the issue,, having your OS and programs all in one makes it slow

[@Moonuhhh]

Can’t shrink my 2Tb hard drive small enough into my 512gb m.2 , how come?

[@cpearson338]

did you figure this out???

[@Moonuhhh]

@@cpearson338 yes

[@rahulverma8774]

​@@MoonuhhhI hv a question Will shrinking effect my data Plz reply as fast as possible

[@Moonuhhh]

@@rahulverma8774 no it won’t

[@rahulverma8774]

@@Moonuhhh thanks

[@ronwatkins5775]

Can macrium reflect clone a Linux boot drive?

[@SpencerCourtis]

...check with the Linux forum folk

[@bubbyboyy]

I thought you had to be shutdown i.e out of windows to do this sort of cloning

[@fabioamado6725]

Where is the free option? I can only find the free TRIAL

[@IansTech]

Look for reflect free 8 - they no longer have new versions of the free one they had. But 8 is still on the site.

[@fabioamado6725]

@@IansTech ok thank you 😊

[@arp0811]

Hi, did you able to find the free option? I could not.

[@fabioamado6725]

I didn’t find. From what i remember i used clonezilla with advanced option that allows to clone to a smaller SSD (I don’t remember what is the option but you can find videos about clonezilla about that)

[@GarbanzoBeansFan]

Nice

[@KnotXackly]

I can't shrink the volume enough

[@0165Akkiboi]

bro looks like skitzy a.k.a. MrBeast from ohio and the 184 dollar ssd sitting inbetween budget ones: 🗿

[@masterkronixster]

Hey. If I follow this .will the old copy still be on the old HDD. Since it's a clone,right there should be the original..just confirming

[@OShackHennessy]

Yes it will still be there. I clone my OS every time I install a new one just in case I have an issue. This way after I set up the OS the way I like it which takes some time I have a spare OS just waiting for me. The computer could explode and all I need to do is drop my safe SSD clone in any system and my old computer is back online.

[@johnnypool2206]

Will you do mine? I'll pay you!!