How to Run Rescuezilla to Clone to Smaller Disk & an Alternative

About Rescuezilla

You may concern about “Rescuezilla clone to smaller disk”. Before introducing its feasibility, let’s have a simple understanding of this software.

Rescuezilla is an easy-to-use open-source disk imaging and cloning software that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. With it, you can make a backup of your hard drive & save the disk image to an external hard drive, and clone a hard disk to another one.

This app is completely compatible with Clonezilla (used by tens of millions of users for disk cloning & imaging). That is, Rescuezilla is the Clonezilla GUI but it is more than a Clonezilla GUI, as its official website states.

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Rescuezilla Clone to Smaller Disk: Is It Workable?

Speaking of Rescuezilla clone, this utility allows you to easily clone a hard drive to another hard disk. Usually, you choose to clone your HDD to an SSD to gain fast speed and optimal performance. It is easy to let Rescuezilla clone to larger drive.

But if your SSD is smaller than the HDD, can Rescuezilla clone to smaller disk? Like other hard drive cloning software, this tool doesn’t support the operation and it requires the target drive to have an equal to or larger storage space than the source disk.

If you persist in cloning a larger HDD to a smaller solid-state drive, a failure will happen due to insufficient space. To successfully clone to a smaller disk, you need to put in some additional effort.

How to Make Rescuezilla Clone to Smaller Disk

#1. Shrink Partition

Since Rescuezilla doesn’t yet automatically shrink partitions, it is a bit intractable for this operation but you can manually shrink the final partition on the source disk.

Step 1: In Windows 11/10, press Win + X and choose Disk Management.

Step 2: In the popup, right-click on the final partition and choose Shrink Volume.

Step 3: Enter the amount of space to shrink and then click Shrink.

#2. Download Rescuezilla, Write It to USB, and Run Windows from USB

Step 1: Visit the Rescuezilla Download page in a web browser and then get the rescuezilla-2.4.2-64bit.jammy.iso file.

Step 2: Download Rufus online, run it in Windows 11/10, connect a USB flash drive to the PC, choose the downloaded ISO image file, and burn it to this USB drive.

Step 3: Restart your computer to its BIOS menu by pressing a key like F2 or Del, modify the boot sequence, and run Windows from USB.

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#3. Rescuezilla Clone to Smaller Disk

Then, you can clone a hard drive to a smaller disk by following the steps:

Step 1: Choose a language and then boot to the main interface, as shown below. Click Clone to continue.

Step 2: When it comes to Understanding Cloning, click Next to choose the source like HDD, and select the target drive like SSD.

Step 3: Select which partitions from the source drive to clone and whether to overwrite the partition table. If you don’t want to modify the default settings, leave it alone and continue.

Step 4: Confirm cloning configuration and click Next > Yes to begin cloning disks.

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Rescuezilla Alternative – MiniTool ShadowMaker

In terms of “Rescuezilla clone to smaller disk”, the cloning process is troublesome – shrink a partition, burn Rescuezilla to USB, boot the PC from USB, and clone a disk. Besides, the user interface is not friendly enough. Thus, you may want to use an alternative to easily clone your disk.

MiniToo ShadowMaker, a professional and excellent backup software and disk cloning software with a friendly user interface, enables you to easily backup files, create a system image, sync files & folders, and clone a hard drive.

Its Clone Disk feature supports cloning HDD to SSD and sector by sector cloning. When cloning a large disk to a smaller disk, this cloning tool can help as long as the smaller target disk can hold all the data of the source disk.

Right now, download MiniTool ShadowMaker and install it on Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7. Then, you can easily finish the cloning operation.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Launch this Rescuezilla alternative and click Keep Trial.

Step 2: In Tools, click Clone Disk to continue.

Step 3: Choose the source drive and target drive.

Step 4: Click Start to begin the cloning process.

Wrap Things up

The “Rescuezilla clone to smaller disk” topic is often talked about by many users and if you are also concerned about it, this post helps you a lot. When needed, follow the given guide to clone your hard drive using Rescue.

To clone to a smaller disk, try a Rescuezilla alternative – MiniTool ShadowMaker. Its easy-to-use user interface lets you easily do the cloning task although you don’t have too many computer skills. Get it to have a try.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe