H there,

I am replacing a win7 hard drive with a SSD one, due to the cost and useage I purchased a smaller size SSD, so I need to first shrink the partition of the original drive in order to fit in. I done the shrinking with Gparted no problem, and then I created partitions on the SSD and formatted as NTFS, also marked as Boot on the first partition like the original drive , then I copy the partitions from original one over to the SSD and that worked.

I repeated the process on another PC, but the SSD won't boot. I did the task with Acronics True Image many times before without problem so I try that again, it took forever to clone the partitions and still that didn't work the SSD won't boot.

I then tried Clonezilla, I used partition to partition cloning, it took much less time than True Image, but still the same result the SSD won't boot. After some retries and messing around I found the SSD has lost the partitions, it is just like a brand new unformatted drive that's weird. I don't know if I got a faulty SSD or something I've done wrong, so please tell me from the start, what should I do to clone a win7 drive to a smaller SSD with Clonezilla, thanks !

you're better bet is getting a imager that is made for Windows to do Windows.

I've used this before it did an great job

https://www.easeus.com/backup-utilit...-software.html

l believe the problem is in the resizing, it is not as straight forward as same size cloning

yeah if that is true, that app I posted link too .. yep didn't bother that bit one bit.

Is it a Samsung SSD? If so, it should come with a data migration application "Samsung Data Migration" that does this for you. Other SSD manufacturers might have equivalents.

And after all that you'd better hope you don't have to re-activate it - I don't think M$oft will be very accommodating for Win7. Generally changing disks is ok, but I have been bitten when I changed once too often apparently. Was years ago, and I had to get on the phone - what a PITA.

I've done that without problem once before, no re-activation required, just don't know what went wrong this time, or the SSD is faulty, it's a WD one.

Resizing may involve changing the blocksize on the media and Windows likes to know about that as it optimizes its IO.

If the process worked for the first PC, but not the second PC, then I would be looking at the state of the second PC.
Have you run the Windows chkdsk program on the second PC to see if the file system is in a sane state?
For resizing, you can try the native Windows tool, but it in my experience it is less than optimal. I prefer to boot a live CD (my tool of choice is SystemRescueCd) and then run 'ntfsresize' with appropriate options from the command line. I always use the -n (dry run) option initially to check that all looks good.

Far better to run a third party tool UNDER Windows.
There's plenty of good disk handling software that are free and run under Windows as well as being stand alone. What you do not want is one that needs Linux to run whilst altering Windows system partitions.

Thank guys for the tips, I finally successfully cloned the drive with Macrium Reflect. I created a rescue disc with it to do the cloning, it was not as smooth as I imagine, mainly due to the H/W support. Linux support was dropped since V6, the rescue disk must be done with WinPE and there are different versions to download. Since I have to clone different PC from XP to Win10 I will have to create different version of the disc/USB to do that, luckily the Win10 one worked on that particular PC with XP, I also tried the Win7 PE but not even keyboard mouse worked, Linux always work and forgiving on different H/W, that's why I struggling to get things done on Linux ! you may ask why I did not create the disc on the same PC, coz that PC was too slow already that's why I install the SSD !

I haven't cloned anything recently, but when I used to do it, I used Ghost from a bootable CD or USB. The thing was to NOT run it in an OS aware mode otherwise it tried to change drive letters and things like that and you ended up with an image that was definitely NOT a clone. Many of the modern backup and clone utilities try to be FAR too clever and end up screwing simple things up.

And from me, I haven't used cloning since Adam wore short pants. Dead loss IMHO.
For Windoze I generally take a system image using M$oft (admittedly basic) tools, and toss it in a drawer and hopefully forget about it.
For Linux I use a variety, but always file level backups of my data - only. Re-installing a distro is monkey-see, monkey-do. My data is all that I value, the rest is just leg-work.

Each to their own ...

One can shrink the main windows partition using windows or a live media. Be sure to defrag it just in case even though windows 7 should do that. You then copy the smaller partitions to the ssd.

Microsoft's suggestion is to make a full backup with system state and the apply the restore to the newly installed windows 7.

If one has some of the hard drives that come with a limited copy of programs like Acronis then they could use it too. WD and Seagate I believe offer a free limited copy. Acronis has been supporting (and using) linux for a very long time.