gpt - How do I clone a larger disk to a smaller disk using clonezilla?

I have a larger disk Disk A and a smaller disk Disk B.

• Disk A contains a few partitions but the total size of all the partitions is smaller than the capacity of Disk B.


• Disk A is a GPT formatted disk.

I tried using clonezilla (ubuntu, precise pangolin version) in expert mode and selected the icds option but on starting the cloning process, it always errors out with an error indicating that it is unable to create the partitions.

Is there any way to make this work?

Answer

The error appears to stem from the use of GPT partitions. The workaround is to use the manual creation of partition table option from clonezilla. The commands needed are HERE:

sgdisk -R /dev/sdY /dev/sdX
where:
sdX = Disk A
sdY = Disk B

Notice the order of the disks or else you will have a problem: GPT table recovery.