System Disk Restore To Smaller Disk

My system disk is failing, multiple sector read errors. For now OMV is still performing as expected. However, replacing the system disk sooner rather than later should minimise disruption.

I have used Clonezilla through OMV backup tab to create images, both disk and partition. My replacement disk is a few Gb smaller in size and I am facing the "restore to smaller disc" problem that seems to be a part of living with Clonezilla.

In an attempt to get around the smaller disk problem I resized the failing system disk with GParted to a size smaller than the new disk. Then I made new images from the resized system disk, both disk and partition images. I am still unable to restore to the new disk.

What seems to be happening is that every attempt to restore ends the same way with a message that the destination is smaller than the source. It looks as if the image always has the size of the source disk rather than the size of the source partition. It does not seem to matter whether the image is created as disk or partition. The expert flag to skip checking of destination disk size seems to have no effect.

I am very much a novice in linux systems and have researched and tried many, many variations of restore with Clonezilla, so far without success. At this stage I resist the temptation to dump large volumes of log files, error messages and the like. If there is a detailed guide fine, a link would be nice. I won't learn if I'm spoon fed and I want to figure my the restore out but I do need a pointer (or two).

Question(s): When restoring a partition image must the destination disk already contain a partition that exactly matches the imaged partition? If yes, is there a way to copy partition data from one disk to a new disk or should I create the target structure with GParted.

Thanks

Thanks for your comment. Amongst other things I did try the -icds option. But, I can't say for certain that I used it in the right context, i.e. all other conditions met.

I will have another go at the weekend and post update.

Ok. So I have had time to more test and attempts at restoring to new disk. All attempts fail. here is a summary:
First I used gParted to resize down the source partition to a size smaller that the new target disc. I then created two images using the OMV backup method of running Clonezilla, a SaveDisk image and a SaveParts image, both in beginner mode.

Restore Parts Beginner mode
The target disc was formatted to contain one partition \dev\sdb1 using all available space
The restore failed with the message "Unable to find target partition sdb2"

Restore Disk Beginner mode
The target disk had all partitions deleted
The restore failed (as expected) with the message "Destination too small"

Restore Disk Expert mode
The target disk was in the state that was left by the previous restore attempt
This time I added the -icds switch plus all defaults
The restore failed with the message "Unable to find the partition sdb1"

It seems to me that Restore Parts in Beginner mode and Restore disk in expert mode are very close to working but I do not understand why the partitions referred to cannot be found. In both cases a temporary image is written as part of the restore.

In the case of my "Restore Parts beginner mode" I started with a single partition sdb1. Was this used to write the temporary image and then the restored image written to the next created partition sdb2 but then some bit not updated to reflect that the restored image was to a different partition?

If so what is the solution?