Have a laptop for the garage. Nothing important on it. And it's old.
320gb drive is failing.
Not a big loss, but will lose the recovery section and drivers, and it's old so drivers can be annoying to come by.
What I want:
- Throw all of this on a 160gb drive I pulled out of my junk bin.
- Including the recovery partition or whatever the OS originally comes on for you reinstall if you need to.
- It's only like, 45gb of stuff across all partitions.
- I've already yanked the drive, have one USB drive reader, but don't have 2. So I need to dump the files onto my PC and then hork them back onto the other drive.
- Need a windows solution, without rebooting or booting into Linux or anything like that, the PC I have access to needs to keep running, also Linux is a scary monster I have spent 25 years avoiding when possible.
...
I attempted to use MiniTool's Shadowmaker to back it up. It did. But when I went to restore, it complained that the new drive is smaller than the old one and refused to restore. Even though the archive is only 45gb on a 160gb drive.
Maybe this is because it is a "clone", not an "image"? I sort of know the difference.
Also, if I try to just copy the files themselves, it complains that I don't have permission. So I can't manually click 'n drag from Explorer.
...
Is there a tool that will do this? Am I just looking at the wrong keywords or wrong part of the correct tool or telling it to do the wrong thing?
I could manually create matching partition sizes I guess, but I lose grasp of what's going on there when it integrates into a laptop, with respect to what the laptop might expect to be there or what the recovery/OS partition might demand be there.
I need some advice for my particular type of ignorance. I keep thinking "This shouldn't be this hard" but, it be like it is.