This howto is also valid for a copy from a larger HDD to a smaller SSD.
It worked fine with me but do this steps at your own risk.
What you need:
- GParted live
- Clonezilla live
- Windows 7 disk
Part 1: Plug SSD to SATA
- Leave the old HDD where it is
- Place the SSD to a free SATA port (e.g. SATA 2 plug)
- Plug the PSU power connector into the SSD
Part 2: Shrink partitions with GParted
- Do not trust the claimed capacity of the SSD: calculate the real capacity of your new SSD disk manually or with a tool like this
- Boot with the GParted disk
- Shrink the last partition on the disk to leave enough unallocated space to fit the SSD real disk capacity: the sum of all the partitions must be less than the real capacity new disk. Keep some margin, you’ll resize the partition later (Part 5).
- Remove the Gparted disk and reboot
Part 3: Clone with Clonezilla
- Boot from the Clonezilla disk
- Select Disk to disk clone: the HDD as source, the SSD as target
- Select Expert mode
- In the advanced parameters list, look for -icds option (Skip checking destination disk size before creating partition table) and check it with the space bar: without this, you cannot copy a larger disk into a smaller one
- Tip: Someone suggests to check the -k1 option to recreate new partitions to fit the disk: in an early Clonezilla version it leads to a segmentation fault error so I has to fix partitions later. With a more recent version (year 2020) it works very well and no further Fix boot step is needed.
- You will get a command like this:
/usr/sbin/ocs-onthefly -g auto -e1 auto -e2 -j2 -r -icds -f sda -t sdb
- Let Clonezilla clone partitions from HDD to SSD
- Shutdown when asked
- Power down the computer then connect the SSD to SATA 1 in place of the old HDD
- Power up the computer
- If you get a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after boot do the steps on Part 4, if not skip to Part 5
Part 4: Fix boot (without -k1 option)
- Insert the Windows 7 disk and boot (a comprehensive howto here)
- Select the Repair computer system recovery (do not do automatically repair)
- Select Command prompt from System recovery options
- Type these commands:
- bootreg.exe /fixmbr
- bootreg.exe /fixboot
- bootreg.exe /rebuildbcd
- Reboot
- Wait for the disk scans
- Log in to Windows: a new driver for the SSD will be installed
- Reboot when asked
- Log in again: your system is ready and running on SSD
Part 5: Occupy all available space
- Now you can do the reverse of Part 2: insert GParted disk and boot from it
- Reclaim the unallocated space expanding the last partition to occupy all the unallocated space
- Reboot and enjoy your new fast disk