Windows 10: Can't shrink HD partition enough to copy to a smaller SSD

HP Core i3 desktop, Windows 10 1809 (PC originally came from HP with Win7)

It's my Dad's desktop PC and I'm upgrading it to a 240gb SSD. Current drive is a 5400rpm 1tb HD. He has less than 50gb of space used (after cleanup) on the existing C: partition, so there's just no need for a bigger SSD.

Yes, I know I could just image the SSD and copy files over from the old HD - but I have a few reasons why I would prefer to clone the existing drive instead.

There's one other issue - all the USB ports on the motherboard died. I added an expansion card with 5 ports, but they only seem to be active within Windows. At boot, it complains about no keyboard - but once it boots up the new USB ports work just fine.

Disk Mangler wont let me shrink the partition below 380gb, I just can't figure out why. Hibernation is disabled, fast Startup is disabled, swap file is disabled. I should be able to shrink this down to 200gb or so to clone it. I've defragged 3 times, rebooting in between each one. No help. Remember there's less than 50gb of space used at present! Is there another (preferably free) tool that can resize this partition down from within Windows?

OR - is there a (preferably free) clone tool that will copy a partition and resize it to a smaller partition on the destination drive? (Again, would have to be from within Windows, so I think this angle isn't likely)

submitted by /u/paulgraz
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:)

 

undo partition shrink

Hi,

If you accidentally shrink the volume of your SSD partition, there is an option to extend the volume as well. To extend the volume of your SSD partition, follow the steps below:

• Press Windows key + X on your keyboard and select Disk Management.
• Right-click the partition that you want to expand and click Extend Volume.
• Select the amount of space that you want to extend.

Keep us in the loop with the result.

 

Windows 10 Image Restore to Smaller SSD

In my quest to find a solution to restore a system image of my Windows 10 installation to a smaller SSD I came across the following discussion:

Windows 7 System Image restore to smaller ssd

I was using 90GB of a 720GB HD. Using the Shrink process from Disk Management it was able to shrink to only 350GB. Not enough for the 256GB SSD I wanted to install. So, I used the GParted method and I was able to shrink the OS partition down to 100GB. But
I was still unable to restore to the SSD.

The problem was that in my case my installation of Windows 10 had two other partitions other than the OS partition. The partitions were in the following order:

System Reserved + OS + System Recovery

After shrinking the OS partition the Unallocated space was between the OS partition and the System Recovery partition:

System Reserved + OS + Unallocated Space + System Recovery

When creating the system image only the three partitions (System Reserved + OS + System Recovery) were backed-up. But the problem seems to have been that the offsets were also included. This offset placed the System Recovery partition
far behind the OS partition, making it not fit on the SSD when recovered.

The solution was to use GParted to move the Unallocated Space partition all the way to the end so that the 3 partitions are one after the other with no empty partition in between any of them. After successfully recovering the image to the smaller SSD I had
to use GParted once more to move the Unallocated Space partition right after the OS partition in order to use Disk Management to Extend the OS partition into the Unallocated Space partition.

I hope this helps. I had to start a new discussion as the one I refer to was locked yesterday.

Thanks,

 

undo partition shrink

I accidentally shrank the partition in my SSD when I was trying to shrink the data. It boils down to lack of understanding. Anyways, How do I undo this as my 32GB SSD now has 200 MB left on it.