Fixed: Clonezilla Failed to Find This Partition in This System

The issue: Clonezilla failed to find this partition in the system

When you try to use Clonezilla to clone a large hard drive to smaller one, you will first get a warning about the sizes because Clonezilla officially does not support cloning disk to a smaller one. If you ignore it, you will likely receive the error: “Failed to find this partition in this system: /dev/sdb1”. Here is a real case:

“I have HDD with three partitions: Hidden (Asus Recovery Partition, 22GB), C (Windows 7, 160GB), and D (some data, 260GB). I have new SSD 250GB and what I want is a clone of Hidden partition and C: to my new SSD. I downloaded Clonezilla and ran device to device cloning. It warned me about the sizes but let me continue and it fails to clone such disks saying: Failed to find this partition in this system: /dev/sdb1.”

Workaround to trick Clonezilla

Normally, Clonezilla will check both hard drives’ size before starting to clone or restore. If the destination is smaller than the source disk, you will be given an error and the process will not start. Luckily, there is a workaround for Clonezilla clone large disk to smaller disk by changing the Clonezilla advanced extra parameters.

1. Shrink the partitions on the source disk. If you are using Windows 10/8/7, you can use the built-in tool, Disk Management. If you are using Linux system, you can free download open source software GParted.

2. After shrinking the source disk, reboot to Clonezilla and choose the Expert mode.

3. Select the source disk and destination disk.

4. In the Advanced Extra Parameters, enable the -icds option.

5. Type y to confirm and then you should be able to clone.

If you still get no luck after these steps, you can try another program that can clone large disk to small one directly.

A better way to clone a larger disk to a smaller disk

AOMEI Backupper Standard is free cloning and backup software for Windows 10/8/7 that enables you to clone or restore from large hard drive to small one without extra preparations. Besides that, it also allows you to clone or restore between MBR disk (Legacy-BIOS based) and GPT disk (UEFI based). Follow the steps below to clone a large HDD to a small SSD:

1. Download and run this program after connecting the destination SSD to your computer.

2. Under the “Clone” tab, select “Disk Clone”.

3. Specify the source and destination drives by simply clicking on it.

4. Check “SSD Alignment” to improve the destination SSD’s performance. Click “Start Clone” to start operation.

Tips: The cloning process will be complete while Windows is running without a restart. Besides, you can also create a bootable media to perform the clone without booting Windows.

Summary

All in all, if you receive the error Clonezilla failed to find this partition in this system, you can use the workaround offered in this article to fix it or use AOMEI Backupper to clone hard drive with different sizes. You can use the Standard edition for Windows PC and Server edition for Windows Server 2019/2016/2012/2008.