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Cloning a failing hard drive to a smaller drive #

Faced with a rapidly-worsening hard drive (and after backing up critical data), I hoped to clone the Windows install to a smaller drive (the only one on hand). Kanguru's Mobile Clone HD One-To-One Duplicator (KCLONE-1HD-MBC) has gotten me out of similar binds before, but cloning to smaller drives is not currently supported.

Here are the boot discs I tried in order and their results (for a similar list, see Windows won't boot (or boots only once) after SSD upgrade):
  1. Paragon Drive Copy 15 Professional - crashed
  2. Acronis True Image 2016 - crashed
  3. HDClone 6.1.5 Advanced Edition - produced a non-working clone with missing partitions
  4. Image for Windows 2.99-00 - produced a working clone!
I was happily surprised astounded that my version 2 license from 2008 was still valid for the current version (2.99-00), which was released as recently as February 25, 2016. Many thanks to TeraByte for a great product and the super-long term support!

/windows | Jun 16, 2016

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