How can I restore an ntfsclone img to a partition smaller than the originally cloned partition? I have an image of a 270g partition that is ~170g full and needs to be put on a 200g partition. Currently, the img lives on an external 374g drive. I am running ubuntu 12.04 on a dell inspiron 1545 with 4g ram and 300g hard drive.

Hi everyone, this is my first post. I'm not entirely sure how to do it, but i assumed that all the important information was supposed to go first, and I should explain how this question came to be later. If you don't care how I happened to end up with this problem, feel free to stop reading.

A few months ago, I needed linux for a class and installed ubuntu on a 4g partition. I soon found that I preferred linux to windows and wanted a bigger partition for it. most of my hard drive was partitioned for windows, but windows used little of it's partition. When I tried to use gparted, I found that there were errors on the drive (I had noticed this years ago, and the reminder was unsurprising). Running chkdsk /b didn't help. After some web browsing, I came across the notion that I could use ntfsclone to copy the filesystem. Then, with my windows partition on my external hard drive, I could delete the windows partition on my computer, repartition it to my liking for linux, and finally, put windows back on a smaller partition. ntfsclone tells me the partition is too small.
I'm clearly in over my head, but I suspect that ntfsclone copied more than I expected it to more exactly than I expected it to if the new partition has to be the same size.

here are some possible solutions that I have considered.
1. restore the img file to another img file in the external drive, mount that img file, and copy the contents onto the new partition.
2. move the img file to my 200g partiton, restore it to my external drive, delete the original image, and copy the external drives contents to the 200g partition. (less appealing than option 1)
3. ask people on linux forums what to do (doing that now)

many thanks

Option 1 is the best option.

You can mount the image using a loopback device

mount ntfsclone.file -o loop /mnt/ntfs

and copy the files from there to the new partition, but you need to be sure you preserve permissions (if that is important to you).

See this link for how to copy from ntfs to ntfs in Linux and preserve partitions.

http://tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=29567

Unfortunately, you can't resize the ntfsclone image easily, or at least in a way that will work.

Be aware that the (Win) system may not be bootable, even if you can restore to that partition.
There are some very lucid warnings in the manpage, and I have found Windows to be particularly cantankerous when its system partition has been screwed with.