Restore system image to new hard drive

[David from Az]

I have been reading articles online that indicate if the target hard drive size is smaller than the source hard drive you cannot perform a restore. I believe I did a restore on my computer running 8.1 pro 64bit where I went from 1 tb to a 250 gb ssd.

So on my other computer being on Windows 7 64bit. I have a restore on an external HD and the size of the drive as the source was 1tb and the target is 500gb. It comes back to inform me the target ssd size is too small.

Any suggestions to make the restore onto the new ssd?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

 

[mjf]

I have been reading articles online that indicate if the target hard drive size is smaller than the source hard drive you cannot perform a restore.

This is true for Windows inbuilt imaging. I suggest you try (free) Macrium Reflect or pay a small amount and buy Paragon Migrate. Paragon is a simple turnkey approach. Macrium requires a little more effort:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/149969-ssd-install-transfer-operating-system.html
I think with Macrium 5 the "drag & drop" transfer takes care of the smaller destination partition and the alignment.

If you can't make a new image and "must" use an old Windows image then you can try to attach/mount the old image vhd then use Macrium. This tutorial describes the basic process.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/210195-system-image-recover-broken-windows-7-system-image.html