How Do I Move Installation To A Smaller HDD?

[user2037]

I've got a large HDD which appears to be unreliable. How can I transfer my existing Ubuntu installation to my old, smaller HDD? (My used data does not exceed the old HDD.)

[darkod]

FS Archiver makes a backup copy of your partition using just the existing data and it can restore it to a smaller partition as long as the data can fit.

But it depends if you have a third disk to use as temporary medium for the backup file. I have never tried using this without creating the backup file.

http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page

[user2037]

Actually running Gparted on the smaller HDD then using Rsync with -a and -P worked quite well. It even allowed resuming so I could stop if I noticed unnecessary data being copied.

Although, I did have to boot a live CD, ch-root to the new installation, and run Grub-install.