How to copy HDD to smaller SSD

[turbotong]

Hi guys, I'm trying to upgrade the HDD in my laptop to an SSD. My HDD has Win7 x64, has a total size of 500GB, but has less than 100GB occupied (factory settings). My SSD is 256GB.

So I saved a factory restore disk onto a USB drive, took out the HDD, and put in the SSD. When I tried to boot up from the restore USB drive, it said that my new SSD was too small. This is stupid because it didn't need the full 500GB to begin with.

What's the best way to solve this problem? I do have a desktop that I can use to simultaneously connect both the SSD and HDD if there is some program that will copy actual data from one disk to another by looking at actual data size and not disk capacity.

 

[Calnin]

One thing you could try, is use that backup of the HDD, and then begin deleting unnecessary programs you don't need to transfer. Once you get it down to windows and whatever vitals you want to keep, transfer things over to the new drive and then do the recovery on the old hard drive and get rid of windows on that old hard drive. Not sure if that will 100% work, but that's my suggestion, probably better off to wait a bit before spending all the time going with my suggestion

 

[hwc1954]

I would just use any halfway decent cloning utility to clone the HDD in its entirely to the SSD. Cloning sofware will take care of the fact that you have a 500mb partition on the HDD and a 256mb partition on the SSD.

What brand is your SSD? Many of them come with at least a one-time use license for a downloadable cloning application. Samsung has one. SanDisk lets you download a one-time use of EZGIG IV and so forth. In your situation, with only 100GB on the HDD, the cloning operation would be easy.

 

[hwc1954]

Here are two free cloning packages:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/index.html

I used Acronis True Image for cloning because I already had it.