Solved migrating windows 7 to backup HDD

Hello.

I am wondering if I can use backup and restore to migrate my install to the backup-HDD.

Can I just boot up from a system repair disk and restore the image from the backup drive to the backup drive?

(I was considering this because the backup drive is smaller than the installation's drive, and I wanted to have more space for backups... however, according to this thread (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/675-system-image-recovery.html

"You will not be able to do a system image recovery to a smaller HDD."

You can do it if you make an image of your system and boot partitions with any of the free 3rd party programs, like macrium free, or Paragon Backup and recovery free.

okay, I will give it a shot.

Going to be switching over from my 1 TB WD Blue drive over to a 700 GB WD Black drive that I am using as backup.

Right now I am running the diagnostic program on the drives to try to be thorough.

Then I will blow away the backup drive to clone my install onto it, using Macrium.

Before I boot up to the new drive I will switch the SATA connectors for old times sake...

so I did it.

the only hitch was resizing some of other partitions, so I just resized the windows partition while it was not active, then I deleted the old data folders and copied them to the new folder.

and then to change the drive from d: to c: I followed the instructions from this link:

Macrium Support Forum - How to boot from cloned drive and make it C drive?

[FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetic]1. Boot into your cloned SSD
2. Click 'Start', type 'regedit' and press enter
3. When regedit starts navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

4. Right click on the 'MountedDevices' key, select 'rename' and rename the key to 'MountedDevicesOld'

5. Close regedit and reboot.[/FONT]

Click to expand...

and now I am backing up the new c: to the old, larger install drive, for better backup capacity...

the drives were reveresed to begin with when I had a black drive fail on me when I had no backup. RMA sent me the bigger blue drive, and then I bought another black for backup...or something like that... finally getting things straightened out.

edit: I noticed that System Protection was still set up for the old c:\, but I was able to remove the old one by right-clicking on it or something, and then I turned it on for the new c:\... so now it will hopefully do its restore points...

There you go.

Glad it worked for you and thanks for the update.