Clone a hard disk to a smaller drive?

[Kyle Rice]

We got like 40 new computers for our lab, and they some of them came with bigger drives than others. So not knowing that i made an image on one of the bigger HDDs and now fog won’t copy that image to the smaller ones, I have tryed to shrink the original partitions down to the smaller size. I’ve even tryed different programs with the smaller partitions and nothing works, I need you guy to help me before I literally throw the computer out the window.

Bigger Drives are 320GB
Smaller Drives are 250GB

[Kevin]

What OS are you trying to deploy and what type of image did you select? If you selected NTFS re-sizable, you shouldn’t have any problems.

[YuYo]

We had a similar issue and this is how we solved it:

Make a Ghost image of the bigger disk into an USB disk.
Restore the Ghost image into an smaller disk.
Upload the image from the smaller disk to FOG

This image should work for either the bigger and the smaller disks.

[Raff]

When you shrink the partitions on the 320GB disk, make sure the free space is at the end of the disk and not in the middle. I prefer using the gparted live CD ([url]http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php[/url]) rather than windows Disk Management to accomplish this

You can use the command <ExtendOSPartition> in your unattended.xml file to expand the volume to use the full disk during sysprep.

[julialloyds]

This post is deleted!

[jclrita]

This post is deleted!

[MichaelDigital]

[quote=“Raff, post: 13178, member: 298”]When you shrink the partitions on the 320GB disk, make sure the free space is at the end of the disk and not in the middle. I prefer using the gparted live CD ([url]http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php[/url]) rather than windows Disk Management to accomplish this

You can use the command <ExtendOSPartition> in your unattended.xml file to expand the volume to use the full disk during sysprep.[/quote]

I am looking for this option, but can’t seem to locate it. Anyone know how to use this? I am referring to the ExtendOSPartion in the unattend.xml file

[MichaelDigital]

ok. i’ve located this in the WSIM. But, what pass do I add this on? Also, because the sizes of the disks vary, inputting a specific size could prove bad. How do I configure this to tell sysprep in the unattend.xml file to just expand the partition to fill the drive no matter what the size?

[Tom Elliott]

According to: [url]http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766473(v=ws.10).aspx[/url]

You can place it on the oobeSystem pass.

Just have this code:
[code]<ExtendOSPartition>
<Extend>true</Extend>
</ExtendOSPartition>[/code]

[MichaelDigital]

Thanks so much Tom. I’m going to try it now and will post the results.

[Lee Rowlett]

the code tom’s posted is what i actively use to handle Win7/8/8.1 (mutli-partition) and i build my image in vm and have the disk only a few GB’s bigger than the image (20-25GB) and expand if the image gets bigger that way you never have to worry about putting it onto a “smaller hard drive” and extend partition in the unattend handles the rest