I have to replace a 250GB HDD with a 128GB HDD. There is a boot-loader partition witch loads several OS on other partitions. There is also a 140GB partition with important but not needed data on it. At least I am not able to temporarily backup this data elsewhere.  I tried several clone-tools like clonezilla. But I found none which would be able to clone a bigger HDD to a smaller HDD if I don't want to clone every partition.  Last but not least, I am not able to shut down the system for longer then 3 hours, hopefully this is enough for 110GB...
13226
I have a hard drive which is 153 GB with 116 GB free space. I would like to clone this drive to a hard drive which is a 149 GB big (this is the largest hard drive I have... It would be typical that my largest drive is only 4 GB to small).   Is there any way to do this (preferably with free or open source programs)? I am running Windows XP.
27261
I need to be able to copy about 2TB of data from an external drive (single USB external disk) to a another external drive (Drobo attached via Firewire).  Finder is not an option. If it hits any problem, it stops the process and I have to figure it out why it failed and start over. It could take me months to get through it.  I've read about CP and RSYNC but I'm not too familiar and I'm afraid I might get some of the switches wrong and miss files, or screw up the file dates, or worst...  Can anyone suggest how I might pull this off with minimum risk and cost?
81169
I've taken the plunge and bought an SSD and want to move my existing Windows installation over. The current hard disk is 500Gb, but I've trimmed the contents down to about ~40Gb. I'm transferring it across to a 100Gb SSD and looking for the easiest way just to copy everything across and set the SSD up as a boot device.  I've looked at a few tools like Macrium Reflect, but they don't seem able to restore to a smaller drive. Do I need to go for something like  to do this? I'm trying to avoid scary Linux-based boot utilities if possible, does anyone know of an easier way?
12266
I wanna create a new partition from the existing root partition.My root partition is about 250GB.I wanna create a new partition say 150 GB taking space from this root partition.Can anyone help me with the procedure on doing this?  output: fdisk -l  karthick@karthick:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for karthick:   Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x28219744  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1   *           1          61      487424   83  Linux Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2              61       30395   243650561    5  Extended /dev/sda5              61         124      498688   82  Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6             124         186      498688   82  Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda7             186       30395   242651136   83  Linux
121520
I have three partitions on my drive, arranged something like the following:   ___________ | 1 |  2 | 3| -------------   I wish to merge partitions 1 and 3.  Is there a way to do this, or do I have to manually "slide" partition 2 over to partition 3, and then merge the newly open space where partition 2 used to be?  Note: I do not have the space to copy partition 2 to partition 3 (2 is 200GB and 3 is 65GB).
34814
The HDD I have my Ubuntu installed is about to fail. I would rather not lose 3 years worth of data, customisation and apps. I am looking for a way to move the complete system (SWAP included, because I'm not sure if I can relink the system to a new SWAP partition) to another HDD. But not the complete HDD&lt; only the partition containing Ubuntu, to a partition on a different HDD. Basically I'd like to do what I've been able to do with Norton Ghost for my Windows install. I thought about using Clonezilla but I think I would have issues with GRUB (Especially trying to boot from a different UUID than what is in the conf file). do you know of any way this could be done?  PS, my home directory is encrypted but that's not really an issue, because I can work around that.  EDIT: changed the explanation to make it clearer
75016
The folder is massive (390GB) and contains many different files. The file system is ext4  I was about to copy this file to another hard drive using gksudo nautilus so I didnt have do a massive chmod operation on the destination hard drive, but then I accidentally hit move to trash, which in gksudo nautilus means permanent deletion. I checked the trash but it's not even an operation...  I have seen tools like testdisk and other recovery tools but none that can recover and whole folder because its made up of different files.   I don't think that this would work but if I deleted the partition could I just recover the whole partition at once?  Or would this be wrong because i have already deleted the partition's content? This is my first job in Linux IT.  I don't have a backup... I was trying to make one because the old backup drive died :(
72078
Till now I was windows user. From now on I want to use only Linux.   I have 500Gb HDD. How do I partition it properly? I read that there is no right or wrong way, but still, I am confused. I did something and I have primary partition mounted on / (160Gb) which I believe is a OS and 350Gb extended partition of which I have 4Gb of swap and 346Gb mounted on /home.  I got used to C:\ and D:\ partitioning, but I don't see file system in that way. I am lost. Where is what? How can I make C:\ partition for OS and D:\ for apps, movies, music, photos. Or what I want is Windows way and I have to get used to Linux way?
103380
I have a 500 GB HDD in my laptop, but when I add up the partitions, they take up 465GB, and there are no unallocated spaces anywhere. Where did that 35GB go?  This is what my HDD looks like in the Windows partition manager:    As you can see, the space used is 0.6 + 0.3 + 409.19 + 37.25 + 2.79 + 15.53 = 465.66GB. On the left, Windows does indeed report the size of the drive as being 465 GB, but I know for a fact that this is a 500GB HDD, unless Newegg, Ebay and Amazon all made mistakes. Can someone please help me get back the 35GB I'm entitled to?   Note: I do know that the HDD has 7 partitions, even if only 6 are shown. The one that you can't see is Microsoft Reserved, and is very small, so that's not what is missing.
116048
I have a bunch of external and internal HDDs that I use on a Linux system. I only have Linux systems, so using a Linux file-system would only make sense, right? However I'm currently using NTFS everywhere, because it gives me the most usable space out of HDDs.  I would like to switch to Linux file-systems now though, mostly because of permissions and compability (e.g. I can't get my LUKS encrypted NTFS partition to resize under Linux, keeps telling me to chkdsk under Windows).  However when I formatted those HDDs I tried out a bunch of different filesystems and every Linux filesystem, even ext2 which as far as I know has no journaling, used a lot of space for itself. I don't recall exact values, but it was over 100GB that NTFS got me more on a 2TB HDD, which is a lot.  So my question is: Is there a way to make ext-filesystems use less space for themselves? Or is there another filesystem (I've tried ext2, ext3, ext4, NTFS and vfat - None of them came even close to the usable space NTFS offered me) with perfect Linux support and great usable space?  I'd love to hear about how and why filesystems (especially ext2 which has no journaling) use that much more space than NTFS and I don't know where else to ask. I'd mostly prefer a way to use ext4 without journaling and anything else that uses up this much space, if that's possible.
77216
I have a image which was taken with Clonezilla as SAVEDISK on a 160GB harddrive. Now a newer version of the PC released with a 120GB harddrive, the space in use is just 20GB  Is there a way I can force Clonezilla (or any other program) to manipulate the images 'original size' to 120GB or lower, so Clonezilla can write it to the new PC?
114054
So I've got 2 hard drives, a 128GB SSD, on which Windows 7 is installed, and a standard 1TB hard drive.  Now I want to install Ubuntu. The SSD has only got about 4GB of space left, and I don't really want to delete anything to make space for Ubuntu so I want to install it on the 1TB hard drive. I know that in order to do this I will have to change the boot order each time I want to switch OSes, but I don't really mind since I won't be using Ubuntu as much as Windows anyway. I've got a lot of data on the 1TB hard drive, about 850GB, but there should be enough for Ubuntu.  My question though, is if I can just make a new partition on this drive and install Ubuntu to it, without erasing any other data. If I can, can I, like I specified, also just change the OS I want to use by simply changing the boot order? Sorry if this has been asked before, but most of the answers I could find were about installing it to an empty second hard drive, whereas I would like to keep the data on mine.  Thanks in advance!
106590
Hello. I was trying to make a bootable flash drive from the startup disk creator, and when I went to erase the flash drive I accidentally erased the wrong drive, a 1TB removable drive. The operation took less than a second and gave no warning. I tried erasing the flash drive and it took about a minute, but it took but a second to erase the 1 TB drive, which is very surprising.  Please help, Gabriel
65978
I have a 80Gb HDD with one partition for Ubuntu and want to partition it into two partitions 60G/20G.   How can I do this?
59801
Can I use dd, rsync, clonezilla or any tool to clone only space in use in my hard disk in Linux? I need to do a backup from a 1 TB HD (with only 2 GB space in use) into a 500 GB HD.
26485
Time Machine stopped this morning, stating it has too little disk space left. It wants to back up 200 gigs, but my local hard drive has 240 gig used and 150 gig are excluded in the Time Machine options, so this leaves 90 gigs of data at most that can be backed up, and I am pretty sure only very few files have changed (no big update or similar). So I would estimate a backup of, at most, 1 gig.  How can this happen? Any idea?
74265
This is what happened:  I was running 12.04.1 and wanted to install 12.10. upgrade, but a fresh install.  When setting up my computer I anticipated for this by dividing my 640GB HD in following partitions: 1. 60 GB for Ubuntu, boot 2. 576 GB for data, mountpoint /home 3. swap, 4GB  The idea was to manually select the correct partition in the installer but I got distracted for a moment and selected the wrong option.  Result: The installer started repartitioning the entire HD.  When I noticed this I interrupted the installer, but upon reboot it was clear that I was too late, no OS to boot to.  I booted from a Gparted Live CD to see if I could recover the data on my previous /home-partition, but it's gone.  Is there any way to recover the lost data? I searched around and read alot about Testdisk, but in all the tutorials I've seen, the set-up has been much easier than what I'm facing.  I've not only lost my partition table, it's been replaced.  Thanks in advance for any ideas that might help!  If extra info is needed, please specify and I will do my best to provide.