How to upgrade hard drive without reinstalling Windows? - HD duplicator not working

[SPL Tech]

I have a 320 GB 5400 RPM drive that I want to swap out for a 100GB 7200 RPM drive I have laying around. The C partition only takes up 40 GB, so there is plenty of space. I defragmented the HD to ensure the clusters are contiguous, and then I put the drives in a hard drive duplicator. I assume the duplicator just reads and copies the sectors in order starting from sector 1 to sector 2, and ect until it reaches the last sector.

The problem is it's not working. The duplicate is not booting properly, which tells me not all of the information was transferred. I assume this is because there is data lying on the 320 GB hard drive somewhere past where the 100 GB sector lies, and where the duplicator stops.

So how can I get all the data to the beginning of the HD, so when I put it in the duplicator it actually copies all data?

 

[-RockMan-]

I have a 320 GB 5400 RPM drive that I want to swap out for a 100GB 7200 RPM drive I have laying around. The C partition only takes up 40 GB, so there is plenty of space. I defragmented the HD to ensure the clusters are contiguous, and then I put the drives in a hard drive duplicator. I assume the duplicator just reads and copies the sectors in order starting from sector 1 to sector 2, and ect until it reaches the last sector.

The problem is it's not working. The duplicate is not booting properly, which tells me not all of the information was transferred. I assume this is because there is data lying on the 320 GB hard drive somewhere past where the 100 GB sector lies, and where the duplicator stops.

So how can I get all the data to the beginning of the HD, so when I put it in the duplicator it actually copies all data?

Your problem goes back right back to hard drive capacity
If your telling the duplicator to copy all the DATA from a large drive to a smaller drive.
Yeah its going to stop because it won't know where to put the remaining data.
Have you thought about using windows 7 back up utility ?
6 Safest Ways To Backup & Restore Your Files in Windows 7 & 8
Also what brand name duplicator do you have and what is the model number ?

 

[iFargle]

^ Yeah, HDD capacity is definitely the issue. Disk duplicators do a bit for bit copy on everything on the drive (even the empty space)

As for getting all the data to the beginning of the drive... Maybe a gparted live CD? I know it can move around partitions.

 

[carnageX]

Skip the duplicator and just use a CloneZilla LiveCD to clone the 320gig to the 100gig. It will only clone used space (so your 40gig) and leave the rest untouched.

If you really want to use the duplicator...then assuming you can do individual partitions rather than the whole disk, you can use a GParted LiveCD to resize the primary partition to < 100gig (don't forget to duplicate the small ~100mb boot partition too), and then use the duplicator.