Large Image to a Smaller Drive

I had a 1T hard drive that reported a SMART sector relocation count exceeded. I sent the drive back to the manufacturer and am waiting for a replacement. I backed-up the drive on to a 40 gig slave and have made a repair disk. Til the replacement comes back I would like to use a 220 gig drive in it's place. When I try to restore the image to the the smaller drive using the Win 7 repair disk I get an error message reporting that BIOS setting for the current drive is too small to accept the image. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated
ZIP

Can you post a screenshot of the message. Also, how are the disks configured in your PC/disk management. I don't think you can back it up - for 7 you need 1TB to 1TB, even if the image is less.

It is hard to get a screen shot running under the repair disk environment, but here is the exact wording of the error message.

Re-image your computer

The system image restore failed

Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original systems disk. Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation (0x80042407)

From what I have read you should be able to restore to a different size drive and not lose your operating system (for people upgrading to a larger hard drive). Apparently the disk to receive the image must be equal to or larger than the original drive. I should have used some third party clone software. I guess I will just have to wait for my 1T drive to come back from Hitachi.

FZ21Z said:

If you've got 33GB of data for example, then common sense should tell you it isn't going to fit back on to a 20GB drive, regardless of what software you used to image/clone.

Use your head if the image can be saved on a 40 gig drive it should be possible to put it on 220 gig drive. It can be done using clone software. Windows 7 restore just doesn't have that capability.

Hi there
Things like Acronis can "re-partition" drives so images can be backed up and restored to different size drives.

Note that Windows 7 sometimes makes a "System Partition" too - so this will need to be copied to a new drive as well.

In the event that it doesn't boot properly on ist boot after moving / copying - use your Windows 7 install disk with "Repair system".

I've found Acronis excellent fpr moving images across systems and re-sizing disks.

For data if the disk you are restoring to is SMALLER than the amount of DATA existing (not the partition size BTW) then it will ask for another disk. You can restore DATA to multiple drives but not Partition images.

You can BACK UP a partition image to multiple disk files as it's only a data set.


Cheers
jimbo

Migrate Easy from Acronis will do it. See whether you can use the demo version.

My problem is the original image is on the hard drive I've sent back Hitachi. All I have is the windows 7 backup of the 1T drive. I don't have another 1 Tara drive or larger to restore image. I guess I will have to wait for the replacement drive to come.

Thanks for the advice