Cloning to an SSD - can you clone a partition??

[XJ980]

Hi I have a question that hopefully the LTT community can help me with.

 

I would like to upgrade my old 2011 Samsung N145+ Notebook. It has an Atom 1.66GHz, 1GB RAM, and a 250GB HDD with things like Windows 10 and Photoshop CS6.

 

I am going to upgrade it to 2GB of RAM and I want to put a 120GB SSD into it. I know about cloning drives and stuff, but its just one thing I would like to ask.

 

Obviously I can't clone a 250GB HDD to a 120GB SSD, but if I made, for example, a 100GB partition on the normal HDD, which has Windows and all of my data on,

would I be able to clone just that partition to the SSD? If so, what free tool/tools can I do this with? Thanks in advance for any help!

[sidas]

Clonezilla [link] can clone partinion to parition, so that should work.

That requires making a bootable usb thumbdrive , Rufus [link] is the best to do that.

I haven't tried booting clonezilla on a notebook though, but I have successfully cloned a 250GB partition of a 320GB HDD to a 256GB SSD with that.

[XJ980]

3 minutes ago, sidas said:

Clonezilla [link] can clone partinion to parition, so that should work.

That requires making a bootable usb thumbdrive , Rufus [link] is the best to do that.

I haven't tried booting clonezilla on a notebook though, but I have successfully cloned a 250GB partition of a 320GB HDD to a 256GB SSD with that.

thanks for the reply, by partition to partition, does that mean i can clone the for example, 100gb partition, to a 100gb partition i make on the SSD, and then once my notebook is up and running on the SSD, i can join the partitions back together? where does the usb come in? I have used rufus before and also, i do have a usb3 external ssd/hdd enclosure if that makes things easier.

[sidas]

You will have to make a bootable usb with a clonezilla image and boot a machine from that with both, the source and target drives attached. 

The target drive will be wiped and a partition will be created by the cloning software, so you don't have to make any partitions on your own. 

After that you should be able to extend the partition in Disk Management (if you're on Windows).

[XJ980]

1 minute ago, sidas said:

You will have to make a bootable usb with a clonezilla image and boot a machine from that with both, the source and target drives attached. 

The target drive will be wiped and a partition will be created by the cloning software, so you don't have to make any partitions on your own. 

After that you should be able to extend the partition in Disk Management (if you're on Windows).

Ok so basically, is this what you mean? -

-keep my HDD in the machine.

-plug in USB with Clonezilla on and plug in the SSD with the external enclosure.

-run Clonezilla and do all of what I need to do on that.

-unplug everything.

-swap out my HDD for the SSD.

and it should all be working fine? sorry, I do understand what you mean but I am just double checking

[sidas]

Yes, it should be fine.  

[Heesleemer]

Acronis should be able to as well

[sidas]

1 hour ago, Heesleemer said:

Acronis should be able to as well

It is a paid piece of software though

[Heesleemer]

12 hours ago, sidas said:

It is a paid piece of software though

I believe the free version can clone still