Moving a Windows install to a smaller drive for free

Let's say you need to swap out an SSD with a smaller one. Maybe you realized the 500GB Samsung NVMe drive in your home office PC would be better used in a gaming machine that currently has a generic 250GB NVMe. I haven't had luck finding a good free program that will image one drive to the other while also shrinking the partitions. It took a couple attempts, but I managed to figure out a method that works.

Prepare the source drive

• Install MiniTool Partition Wizard from here
• Run Partition Wizard
• Shrink C: partition
• Move last partition to the left, touching the C: partition
• Apply changes
• Reboot
• Make sure everything is good
• Shut down

Clone the drive

• Boot up a Linux live distro
• List disks with this command:

lsblk

• Copy drive with this command

dd if=/dev/sourcedisk of=/dev/destinationdisk

• Power off after completion
• Swap the drives

Clean up the destination drive

• Boot into Windows
• Open an admin command prompt
• Run this command:

chkdsk C: /f /r

• It will want a reboot in order to run
• Reboot
• After it runs, reboot again
• Run Partition Wizard
• If it's still showing the free space that was on the larger drive, uninstall Partition Wizard, reboot, and reinstall it
• Run Partition Wizard
• Move the rightmost partition to the right end of the drive and apply
• Extend the C: partition and apply
• Reboot
• Run chkdsk again