Windows 7 - Drive Image missing 1 MB

I use a program from Spotmau to make Images of my installation. Last week I was playing around with Win 7 and managed to corrupt it to the extent that I needed to use my image again to get back to where I was originally.

The thing is that when I try to restore the image and select the destination drive it tells me the drive is 1MB to small for the Image It has always worked fine in the past what could have gone wrong and how can I get this 1 MB back as this fresh installation I have had to do it driving me nuts

Just a thought but is there such a program to reset the Drive back to the brand new state when I bought I mean some kind of tool from Hitachi ???

If you are going to clean the drive, diskpart might help using the clean command. It seems to put it back to an un-initiated state. Boot to the Install DVD and open a command prompt and type the following and hit enter after each command.
diskpart
clean

Use exit to leave the utility

Have you checked your backup settings to see if you might have set something wrong?

If you use a bigger drive would it work?

Sadly don't have a bigger drive to test on But I will try what you have suggested and thanks.

I would recommend a couple of things for future reference. Instead of backing up a drive, backup it's partitions, assuming that there is more than one. A good backup program is able to restore the image of a partition to a larger or smaller partitions (within limits). A good backup program should also be able to restore to a somewhat smaller drive, and if Spotmau is not able to do so, I would find a program that can, such as Acronis True Image. There are others that I suspect can do this, like Paragon, Macrium Reflect, etc., but I have not used them enough to know.

EDIT: Also, to keep the size of the image small, do not include freespace in the backup. This will give greater flexibility on the new partition size.

seekermaster, It is my experience, that you can always restore an image to a bigger partition, but not neccessarily to a smaller partition. For that you need to use cloning (e.g. the Copy function in Norton Ghost). Tell me if I am wrong.

It has been a while since I have done anything like this, so I'm going on memory, which sometimes is not all that sharp, but if a person only backs up the actual data on a partition, and not the freespace, the image from a larger original partition should fit on a smaller partition without a problem, assuming that the space on the new partition is sufficient to accommodate the data.

Maybe you are right. I have to experiment with this one day. But then there is still the MFT problem - the MFT hanging somewhere in the upper parts of the partition. Maybe someone who really knows can tell us.

The only time I ran across a 1 mb space on a hard drive was when I was playing with installing XP under specific circumstances. It was almost like XP would create its own MBR. Many times this was associated with the 9 GB partition you see in many of the attached Disk Management pictures.

I certainly do not know for sure, but maybe the extra 1 MB is coming from an area not normally available and then causes an error or disagreement in the drive parameters.