CF-19 MK6, need to downsize/clone the SSD

I guess...

I am going to downsize from a barely used 256gb SSD to a 90GB SSD that should actually be faster. I have nothing on this laptop except my tuning software. I can do a clean reinstall on that quickly enough I guess.

Time to go digging through my tools. A simple reinstall of W7 might be better since I have almost nothing on this anyways. But a quick resize/clone/pop in would be even nicer since this is a legit license anyways...

No real questions, yet. But advice is always welcome. I am going to get a hackin!

 

Nope so a simple W7 reinstall is not simple. The product key is invalid. Not sure what ISO I used, but the W7 64bit OEM one isn't a valid iso according to the Windows USB tool, that was of course difficult to find. Trying Etcher, but it keeps giving me a "not a bootable device" no MBR record found blah blah. Doing this off the Mac. Just downloaded Etcher, Rufus, and Universal USB Installer for the PC. I got a non-activated W7 on the CF-19. Lets see what happens... I will try doing it from windows.

EDIT: I should have stopped here and made a repair disk….

Alright seems that the .iso is corrupted. So trying to clone the drive instead... I am sure this will go wrong lol... Okay so a few attempts failed...

1) Used USB blah blah too to create gparted and etcher boot usb drives
2) Got failures until I loaded gparted into ram, then resized drive down leaving a nice bit of free space.
3) Shutdown, let windows boot up. Goes into a check file system screen.
4) Windows reboots again. Okay we are now only 86 gb. Shutdown.
5) Put drives in, reboots into Windows ARGGGHHH. Force shutdown.
6) Bios has oddly enabled EVERY device in the boot order. I disable the HDD. Still boots into windows. Fine, Restart. Nope same. Shutdown. Huh, BIOS is set for normal, change to compatible. Oh and hey somehow BIOS had more than one hard drive in the list?! disable everything, set USB key to top slot and Hard drive to second.
7) break lots more stuff….. I finally had some success, and finally failure.

I got gparted to copy/clone the partition. But I didn’t copy/clone the mbr in front of the partition. I figured if I needed too, I could pop back in and do so. Translation; I know enough to be dangerous but not enough….

No surprise I suspect the MBR was broken. Windows booted up into the setup with an error and “put the recovery disk in to repair” message. I grabbed a recovery disc, probably not the correct one. I couldn’t make the correct one since the W7 OEM image was broken.

Windows repaired. The repair seemed to reference missmatched product keys. Windows boots up and spends 15 minutes configuring the desktop. Then boots up rest of the way to a this version of windows isn’t genuine.

I think I needed to clone both the MBR and the partition. I will try that tonight I guess. Trying to sort this all before NBR here goes dark….

 

minitool partition wizard will do what you need and easy to use.
clonezilla in linux good also.
they both do mbr or newer uefi

 

Thank you kschewe!!! I am leaving this rambling as it might help somebody else, or me the next time I do this. If I can still access resource in 6-12 months when I need it again...
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Alrighty, Clonezilla hopefully for the win! And... ...nope, doesn't work... Not in "re-re" beginner mode. Destination disk is too small. Going from smaller to larger is easy, larger to smaller, not so much.

I have been staring at these long enough though that the second choice to just clone partitions, I might be able to pull off. gParted was similar, just more graphical.

Okay the system reserved first partition is done, lets try the second one. Odd, I had made the source partition smaller than the target disk, but it looks like it just said it was flipped. Something about remapping. I only comprehend about half the ramblings linux spits out at me. Ugh the waiting game is the worst I hope I selected the right drives in the right order...

WINNER WINNER chicken DINNER! Okay, FINALLY. Not sure Clonezilla was easier to use than gParted, but it explained each step much better. I had to clone the system reserves, and the main partitions. And watching the linux ticker tape messages, it knew what I had done and actually fixed something in the MBR to match the OS I cloned onto the partition.

gParted was easier, kinda, to use for sizing down the source partition. It kept failing until I saw a random 512 a sector reference. So I doubled that to 1024 and changed the size down by that twice. It never said anything, but I had a feeling that the exact amount it was being changed by was the problem.
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