Cloning Seagate hard disk with downsizing of selective partition

[Non-$ensoi]

My computer has a Seagate hard disk in it of capacity 640 GB. It is partitioned with C drive getting the highest space as most of the important softwares will be installed in it. D drive contains all the entertainment stuff like videos and music files. E drive again consists of many important documents. I wanted to clone the hard disk with Seagate XT 500 GB hard disk I have. As you can see that the source hard disk is of greater capacity than the target hard disk, so I want to downsize the D drive in the cloned version of my hard disk. How is it done, is there any software that will do it?

[chuck28]

You can use Diskmgmt.msc to perform the cloning process. But from my experience, Diskmgmt.msc does not compress the hard disk partition precisely. The difference between the two hard disks is 140 GB. I don’t think that Diskmgmt.msc will optimize the drive as per the large need on the clone drive. You can also try PowerQuest Partition Table Editor (PTEDIT32.EXE) for cloning with keeping the partition low. This software works on Sector which helps one to downsize the partition.

[Mallory c]

Downsizing a clone hard disk to optimize in 140 GB less space is too much for this type of work. If the drive that will be downsized, contains nothing important that can be afforded to be lost, than you can skip that drive in the clone hard disk. If you are so adamant on having the drive, then I suggest that you downsize all the drives proportionately. You can try Disk Wizard for this purpose. It will manage the downsizing of the clone hard drive very well.

[fflygirl]

I suggest that you use Ubuntu for creating a clone disk. The process when done in Windows can become unstable due to the process structure that can cause interruption in read and write of the data. Ubuntu has a secured and stable process structure which is beneficial in such tasks.