Macrium wont work unless I resize the OS partition?

Its at 2% of the clone. I expect this will take hours. The drive has slowed way down and it failed the seatools long test but passed all the others. Symptoms were extremely long boots, long load times for programs, but SFC and DISM were all ok as was smart data. Check disk had a few errors but it repaired fine. But its so slow, took 10 minutes to boot, 4 minutes to start Chrome up. etc.... So I got a 500 gb SSD Sandisk Ultra.

Now at 6%. Without my desktop, I could not have done this, pity nobody knows how to clone a drive with only 1 drive bay like laptops have.

Now at 8%, so its doing this faster than the 6 hours to make the image. Of course the image was being written to a 320gb Maxtor IDE drive in a usb 2.0 case.

Now 15%, at least its doing it.
Resizing is not entirely automatic, I dont know what software version the other guy was using on his example of a 60gb going to a 30 gb without the user doing anything on a clone . Maybe with the paid version, I can not explain the discrepancy considering my experience here with using it. I am using the free home version. When I removed the last RECOVERY partition from the clone, Macrium proceeded and adjusted the 1 TB partition down to 465 gb or so.

How to clone your PC hard drive using Macrium Reflect | Windows Central

Cloning to a smaller or a larger hard drive

Dealing with partitions when moving to a hard drive of a different size requires a couple of extra steps. If you're moving to a smaller hard drive, you want to ensure your data fits. The first thing you want to do is clean up your original drive so that it has less data than the new drive can hold. If you're moving to a larger hard drive, you want to expand the primary partition so that it takes up the entirety of the new disk.
Here are the changes you need to make in Macrium Reflect when dealing with hard drives of different size. Insert the following steps in between step 6 and step 7 in the preceding instructions.

dalchina said:

How to clone your PC hard drive using Macrium Reflect | Windows Central

This talks about MR free. Step 6 of How to clone... :


Includes screenshots.

A little later:

It wont work on a laptop. You have to have both drives in the system and running at the same time to use Macrium if the destination drive is a different size. the image is just for rescuing your current disk. Which means to restore an image you took, your new drive has to be the same size or maybe bigger, but it can not be smaller than your busted disk. Disk images are a nice idea, but thats a significant limitation. Imagine you have a big 5tb imaged drive with only 3tb of info on there, which when 5tb drive breaks, and you think, I have a 4tb drive, let me restore onto it, it will fail to do it. You will have to buy another 5tb drive to restore the image, so your image is now worthless to restore it..

Up to 33% progress now.

Halfway through the clone, windows said it had updated the os and MUST be restarted right now. But I selected postpone, would it have restarted if I had not been here to baby sit and stop it?

f14tomcat said:

That depends on the wording of the message. Did it say something like "Restart after active hours"? If so, it would have waited. Not sure what you mean by it said "MUST". That could be anything MS comes up with. Try to remember what it said. Short answer.... I doubt it, was probably a reminder of sorts.

MUST was part of the wording. It was disconcerting, so I am siting here to make sure it wont power off. At 89% on the clone now.

Finished.

Now to test it in the laptop.

its super fast. boots in a few seconds instead of 10 minutes. All seems good.

I ran userbenchmark, and it still flags the drive as below what most people experience, any ideas?
Could be the motherboard, or cpu and its just the way this is? I am really happy with it.