Cloning to a smaller hard drive

I am a user of True Image Home v10. I have a Dell XPS 400 Win XP with internal 500 GB HD split between two 250 drives in a Raid-0. TI in boot mode sees a C: partition of 470 Gb, a 4 GB FAT32 Dell system restore partition, and a 50 MB FAT16 Dell diagnostics partition. I want to eliminate the Raid setup and split my data between the two drives, one the boot drive for the system and the other pictures, music, etc. I was thinking I could store the media folders off to an external drive temporarily, leaving less than 100 Gb of OS and programs on the 500 Gb drives to work with, and install a new additional internal 250 Gb drive (there is a room for a 3rd), which will give me a total of 3 internal 250 Gb drives. My question is, since at this point I only have the 100 Gb OS and programs being utilized across the 500 GB Raid setup, is there a way to clone that to the new empty 250 Gb (it is smaller than 500 Gb) and make it the new boot drive? That way I won't have to destroy the original Raid drives (and their data) until I can verify that I can boot to and use the new 250 Gb drive housing my OS and programs. Once that is done I can reformat the Raid setup to two separate drives and move the media files from the external HD back. The user guide doesn't mention anywhere about cloning to a SMALLER hard drive, only a larger or same size one. Is it possible to do this and get the MBR copied correctly so it will boot/function? Should I clone/image just the C: partition, or all three (the other small Dell partitions also)?

 

I wouldn't think you'd have any problems cloning to a smaller hard drive as long as it fits. See this link: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=150596

I know that you can restore partitions images to smaller partitions than the original so if cloning doesn't work for you make a backup image and restore that.

If you want to keep the functionallity of the Dell partitions (system restore, etc.) then do a whole drive image. If you clone then they'll be copied also. If you remove them and those partitions are before the windows partition then you may have to edit the partition numbers in the boot.ini file so that windows will start.

 

Well I must say I am impressed. I was able to clone to the larger HD then wipe out the RAID on the original then clone the larger one back to new, smaller partitions on one of the original drives. I did everything from the boot disk so Windows wouldn't butt in and hide files and freak out on what was going on with "its" drive. Great product, Acronis! Thanks Mudcrab! (the only bug I ran into is that when creating a no-password disc image backup from the Acronis boot disc it still prompts you for one when a Windows Search runs into the .tib file, but that's for another post I guess.