Restore from larger disk to smaller disk

[axboi87]

I've got a 500gb internal drive and a 240gb SSD.
Used space on the internal 500gb drive is only 90gb
When trying to restore using disk utility i'm given the error "Not enough space on disk ____ to restore"
I've used iDefrag and Diskwarrior on the internal drive
I've made an image from the internal drive (came out to 57gb compressed) and tried to restore from that and it still gives me that error

Not sure what to do at this point other than do a clean install of Lion onto the SSD and use migration assistant or do a Time Machine backup restore to it
But I shouldn't have to do that!!!

Any ideas or workarounds before resorting to the above?

 

[r0k]

I've got a 500gb internal drive and a 240gb SSD.
Used space on the internal 500gb drive is only 90gb
When trying to restore using disk utility i'm given the error "Not enough space on disk ____ to restore"
I've used iDefrag and Diskwarrior on the internal drive
I've made an image from the internal drive (came out to 57gb compressed) and tried to restore from that and it still gives me that error

Not sure what to do at this point other than do a clean install of Lion onto the SSD and use migration assistant or do a Time Machine backup restore to it
But I shouldn't have to do that!!!

Any ideas or workarounds before resorting to the above?

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy one drive to the other. I've done this several times going from larger HDD to smaller SSD and I wound up with a bootable SSD drive. One step you have to remember not to skip is to use Disk Utility to partition the SSD as GUID partition scheme HFS+ before doing the clone. If it came Apple Partition Scheme, even if you let CCC do the clone, the resulting drive won't be bootable. CCC usually works in "file mode" and it can easily copy a larger drive (that's mostly empty) onto a smaller drive. If you tell CCC to clone a drive you did NOT boot from, it can work in block copy mode where the destination drive must be the same size or larger than the drive you are cloning from (if I recall).

 

[xgman]

I've actually done this somehow on Disk Utility several times (booting from a different drive (or even the dvd) so not running disk utility from the drive your cloning) and had it work just fine from larger to smaller bootable clone. Definitely format the drive cloning to first, as bootable Apple etc..

 

[r0k]

I've actually done this somehow on Disk Utility several times (booting from a different drive (or even the dvd) so not running disk utility from the drive your cloning) and had it work just fine from larger to smaller bootable clone. Definitely format the drive cloning to first, as bootable Apple etc..

Thanks for pointing this out. My only experience using DU to go larger to smaller was when I was trying to make a Lion install stick and I was unable to restore InstallESD.dmg to a 4 GB USB stick but of course the reason that wouldn't fit is there was slightly more than 4 GB of data.