Macrium wont work unless I resize the OS partition?

I decided to clone a 1 TB drive to a 500 gb SSD drive in a laptop.
I thought use Macrium, every likes it.
So I backed up the entrie drive to to an external USB drive which took 6 hours.
But it seems all this time is wasted. Macrium says the destination drive is too small.

Can I tell Macrium to somehow use the backup adjust it to fit?
The data on the 1 TB drive amounts to 180gb only.

Is there some other program that I can use that is easier?
I dont know what to do now.

I did something similar to this recently using AOMEI but I simply did it as an image restore of a of an image file to a different and smaller partition.

It may be possible to do what you want but isn't a clone a clone, a bit perfect image wheras an normal disk image file would be way smaller in any case (if you only have 180Gb to back up) and would just restore to the new drive. You could then resize the restored image using Windows own disk management.

Dont assume I know anything about words.
I just tried following this here
https://forum.macrium.com/Topic3908.aspx

It just always says insufficient space on destination drive. Even though that poster says it adjusts automatically.

I dont know what to do.

Macrium seems setup to only restore partitions to the same existing hardware where the image was taken?
I have a new smaller drive.
Is it then supposed to be this one as it is new hardware?

From the rescue environment you can launch Macrium ReDeploy to adapt the recovered Windows system to its new environment whether that is a virtual machine or a different computer. With Macrium Reflect ReDeploy, you can restore an image to a replacement computer or even create virtual hard drives to virtualize the machine, a technique sometimes called Physical to Virtual or P2V.Macrium ReDeploy is now included in all paid editions of Macrium Reflect. This excludes the Free Edition and 30 day trials.

I am willing to start over with something else if anyone knows it will work.
I only have one drive bay in the laptop.

dalchina said:

Macrium Reflect Clone from Bigger Drive to Smaller Drive - YouTube

There's a video..
Question asked: (example):
Can Macrium Reflect resize partitions when restoring to a smaller drive?

Ok, wil watch the video, but ASFAIK, I already did this and it says it cant do it.

After selecting your backup archive and destination disk, you can just select "Copy selected partitions" and the partitions will be auto scaled to fit a smaller disk. In this example the backup of a 60GB disk is being restored to a 30Gb disk.

Ok, the video wont work ASFAIK for ME. since the video is talking about a clone event done at the same time. I only have one hard drive bay. I cant clone it directly drive to drive. I suppose I could rip my desktop PC apart, put the drives in it and do it that way??

It seems making the Macrium the image was a waste of time.

So what do people do for laptops when putting in a new smaller SSD drive?
I only can run one hard drive at a time, not 2 drives.
Anyone just tell me what will work without me wasting hours of time. I am open to using something else.

What a pain, have to pull out the big desk, yank apart the desktop PC, disconnect other drives, figure out which is my boot drive, plug in the little laptop drives and do a clone and hope it works and will it even boot after yanking it all back out and putting laptop back together. Is there an easier way to do this?