Bdtyktl

I am trying to move my OS X install to a smaller disk because I plan to move to another OS, but this is taking much longer than planned so I hope someone can help me here.

The SSD that now holds OS X is divided into 4 partitions: EFI, Yosemite, Recovery HD (linked to Yosemite), El Capitan. I have shrinked each partition (except EFI of course) and moved it to the left, so now only the first ~120GB of the disk are used, the rest is unallocated. Also note that this is a Hackintosh so there are slight differences when it comes to the bootloader and the content of EFI (even though I have cloned this install in the past - from a HDD to this SSD with the same size, so I cannot explain the problems that I am having now). This SSD works flawlessly on all partitions and Disk Utility doesn't detect any problem.

The first thing I tried was creating partitions on the HDD that start and finish at the same sectors as the SSD (using gpt in terminal iirc) then using Disk Utility (later tried with Gparted) to clone the original partitions to the new ones and repairing the disk to fix the partition table. That did not work - the disk was not bootable.

I have read from this and other sites that people use Disk Utility to simply restore a bigger disk with enough free space into a smaller one and it just works. I have tried the same but I get a weird error (OSStatus error 6): the volume is not of type Apple_HFS or Apple_UFS. Except for EFI, this is not true. The destination disk had an empty partition formatted in HFS+, but anyway Disk Utility reported the error before it could check the destination. Note that I tried this from El Capitan, Recovery HD and a separate High Sierra installer USB stick.

I have tried creating an image of the entire disk. To do this I formatted another 500GB disk in GPT with a HFS+ partition and used it as the destination of the image file, but Disk Utility lamented that it needed a space as big as the source drive, even if the image was supposed to be compressed.

Using CloneZilla didn't bring me much further. Trying disk-to-disk clone gave me an instant error - even after selecting the option to not check the size of the destination disk against the source (I will try this again tomorrow with a new SATA-USB adapter that I got today). CloneZilla, like many Linux tools, reportedly have not optimal support for HFS+, but I read that people have successfully used it to clone MacOS disks. I have also tried making an image of the disk using Clonezilla. It seemed to run well, and it finished copying data from each partition, but right before the end it found an error and interrupted the operation, rendering the image unusable (I haven't recorded the actual error here, I can rerun it and report it if you think it can be relevant.). The image was going to the same 500GB drive used earlier with Disk Utility, only this time formatted as exFAT.

I then accepted trying commercial software. I tried Carbon Copy Cloner, which lets the user only clone single volumes at a time. I tried cloning all the contents but after this the drive was not bootable. I later tried to dd the EFI partition from the SSD, but it made no difference. Note that the single volumes on the newly cloned drive booted fine if I launched the bootloader (Clover in my case) from an other disk (the SSD or the install USB). Iirc the same happened after trying a few other methods mentioned above.

At this point I'm out of ideas, and this is getting a little frustrating. What am I overlooking? How can I clone this disk and just use it like if it was the original? Thank you for the help.