Clone 500G HD to 250G SSD for a noob?

[Raycaster]

Notebook: Acer Aspire 7745g
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650 + Intel (r) HD Graphics (switchable graphics cards)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 450 @ 2.40GHz
Audio: Realtek ALC670 @ Intel Ibex Peak PCH + ATI Radeon HDMI @ ATI Redwood/Madison
Wi-Fi: Broadcom BCM43225 802.11b/g/n Wireless Network Adapter

With many helpful replies I have my laptop running MacOS 10.12.6 with just a few more tweaks will be perfect. It was a big struggle as my skills (lack of) really aren't up to the challenge so I hoped cloning what works so far would be optimum with speeding things up with a SSD.

The laptop has a great dual hard drive setup and I was thinking on simply cloning the working 500G HD over to a 250G SSD.

I've had no success with CCC as the HDD only has 40G on it and the file transfer starts quick but after 10 mins 50% done it slows to a crawl and after 4hrs errors out.

Clonezilla doesn't appear to resize...

I was hoping to clone to the smaller SSD and then copy over the working EFI and apfs.efi etc.

Any suggestions of course would be welcomed.

 

[RehabMan]

Notebook: Acer Aspire 7745g
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650 + Intel (r) HD Graphics (switchable graphics cards)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 450 @ 2.40GHz
Audio: Realtek ALC670 @ Intel Ibex Peak PCH + ATI Radeon HDMI @ ATI Redwood/Madison
Wi-Fi: Broadcom BCM43225 802.11b/g/n Wireless Network Adapter

With many helpful replies I have my laptop running MacOS 10.12.6 with just a few more tweaks will be perfect. It was a big struggle as my skills (lack of) really aren't up to the challenge so I hoped cloning what works so far would be optimum with speeding things up with a SSD.

The laptop has a great dual hard drive setup and I was thinking on simply cloning the working 500G HD over to a 250G SSD.

I've had no success with CCC as the HDD only has 40G on it and the file transfer starts quick but after 10 mins 50% done it slows to a crawl and after 4hrs errors out.

Clonezilla doesn't appear to resize...

I was hoping to clone to the smaller SSD and then copy over the working EFI and apfs.efi etc.

Any suggestions of course would be welcomed.

Shrink the partition small enough to fit on your SSD.
Then clone with Disk Utility ("Restore").