Move 2TB Win7x64 to 640GB HDD

Question

Basically I just got a new (refurbished) HP H8-1260t to use for Windows Media Center.

The shipping drive is a 2TB Hitachi drive, but I have an older and barely used 640GB WD Caviar Blue 7200RPM drive I would like to move my Windows install to. I have about 750GB of data with over 1TB free left on the drive.

Having googled my heart and fingers out, I would think that I can shrink my partition down to the size it is full at now with over 1TB free for a second partition where I can move my media files to further shrink my boot partition so that I can fit a system image smaller than 640GB on that WD drive.

I want to have a separate drive for Media and TV Recordings from my boot disk. Does this sound like the easiest method for me? Or am I doing this all wrong. Help appreciated.

Answer 1

Should work after enough data is moved, now you just have to choose your 3rd party software to make an image of the partition(s) you wish to move to the 640. Once the image is made, apply it to the 640, swap the drive in and hopefully it will boot the first time.

Most 3rd party image software's can move from a larger partition to a smaller one, as long as the total amount of data will fit on the smaller partition. There is no need to shrink it to 640 before you make the image, as long as you move enough data off of the partition you wish to image>apply to the 640.

Answer 2

I'd go with this dude's answer. It worked for me seamlessly.

https://superuser.com/a/252706/129638

Answer 3

You can do ntfs resizing and/or cloning easily with any Linux live cd/ that comes with ntfsutils and gparted. Moab's answer already contains information for preparing partitions so i'll skip that part.

There is also GParted Live that boots from CD or USB. Another good alternative is Clonezilla Live.

Both gparted and clonezilla is well documented (most of time they will explain operations on demand) and easy to use, even when it comes to advanced features.