Cloning a two partition HDD onto a smaller HDD and maintaining MBR

Question

I have a hard disk(A) containing two partitions - A1 is a NTFS partition containing a windows OS, and A2 is an NTFS partition containing data. I want to copy both of these partitions onto a different, smaller hard disk(B) and have B be bootable (so copying the MBR would be helpful).

I've resized A1 so that the sum of A1 and A2 is less than the total size of B, but I can't use dd to copy the drive since the source drive is still larger and there's a gap in the partition table between A1 and A2. I've tried clonezilla, but it seems to have the same problem.

Is there a way for me to copy these partitions to B without having to go out and buy Ghost?

Answer 1

Shrinking the filesystems and partitions on disk A to make them small enough to fit on disk B was the correct first step. If you really need to be able to copy the MBR, then you have to move A2 so that it starts immediately after A1. I think gparted can do this.