How to Clone GPT Disk To Smaller SSD With Successful Boot?

Can I clone my GPT disk to smaller SSD?

"Hi Experts, I have a system installed on HDD-GPT disk. I want to transfer the GPT disk to a new empty SSD drive, but it is slightly smaller than the source HDD. So I am little bit confused about whether I can clone my HDD GPT disk to the smaller SSD drive. What’s the best way to clone it so that the SSD will become bootable. Thanks for any advice."

SSD drive offers faster speed in reading, writing or transferring data than HDD. Besides, it is less likely to make noise since it does not have moving parts inside; it tends to use less power because it does not require any power to spin any platter. Thanks to all those advantages, more users decide to upgrade their current GPT HDD to SSD drive. However, SSDs are more expensive than HDD in terms of dollar per gigabyte. So many users just have a smaller SSD for disk upgrade, but is it possible to copy a larger HDD GPT disk to a smaller SSD? Just keep reading!

A powerful disk cloning tool is required

It is easy to clone a smaller hard drive to a larger hard drive for most computer users. However, how do we clone a larger disk to a smaller disk? Actually, this can also be easily accomplished with a powerful disk cloning utility. Among all options on the market nowadays, we highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This partition manager's "Disk Clone Wizard" can help users to clone HDD, SSD, memory card, SD card, USB flash drive or other hard drives in Windows 11/10/8/7 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Moreover, it provides the “Clone Disk Quickly” method, allowing you to clone a larger disk to a smaller disk since this method only clones used sectors from the source disk to the destination disk. So, you can easily clone GPT disk to smaller SSD on condition that the SSD has enough space to hold the used sectors of source hard drive. Furthermore, the cloned SSD drive will be bootable as well, so you don’t need to worry about any boot failure after the clone is done. There is the demo version for a free trial.

Steps to clone GPT disk to smaller SSD for Windows PC

To clone a larger GPT disk to a smaller SSD drive via AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can first convert the SSD to GPT if it is using MBR partition style now so that you don’t need to change boot mode from UEFI (GPT) to Legacy BIOS (MBR). Or you can keep its MBR partition style and switch the boot mode afterward. If there is something necessary on the SSD, please first back up them to another safe location before the cloning process.

Step 1. Connect the SSD to your computer. A SATA-to-USB adapter might be required for the connection if you are using a laptop that always has only one hard drive bay. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional on your PC.

Step 2. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 3. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 4. Select another drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 5. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD. 

Step 6. You can preview the disk cloning operation by viewing the "Pending Operations". To commit the "Pending Operations", please click "Apply" and "Proceed".

When this process is finished, you can reboot your computer, enter BIOS to change boot order and make the smaller SSD as the first boot device so that you can boot computer from the SSD drive. To make it more easily, you can directly swap out the GPT disk with the smaller SSD drive.

Extra tip: What if the SSD is too small to hold the used sectors on the GPT disk?

The above "Clone Disk Quickly" method can help clone GPT disk to smaller SSD only when the the SSD drive has enough capacity to hold all used sectors on the GPT disk. So, what if the used sectors are still bigger than the SSD total capacity? As a workaround, you can clone only operating system from GPT disk to smaller SSD drive via “Migrate OS to SSD Wizard” of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This wizard will migrate OS related partitions from one disk to another one with secure boot. Finally, you can use the smaller SSD as the boot drive and the HDD as the data storage usage, still a great solution to give your PC a fresh start.

Bottom Line

So, it is not difficult to clone GPT disk to smaller SSD as long as you employ the reliable disk cloning software. Additionally, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional also supports converting MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, aligning SSD partitions, recovering lost partition on SSD, HDD or other storage device, making a portable Windows USB drive and so on.