restoring saved image to smaller hard drive

[khakiman]

i created a windows 7 image of a 80 gig drive and now i need to put it on a 40 gig drive but win7 is not letting me. the entire windowsimagebackup folder is only 9.71gig.

i am able to open the image in winimage but i dont know what to do next to make it think it belongs on a smaller drive. any help?

 

[rap33042]

khakiman:
Welcome to SF! A Great Place to be...

I would be able to help you better if I had an idea of what type of hardware you have.
Fill in your System Specs (this can be done within the User CP at the top of any SF Page); what I need to know is what HDD(s) you have.
I happen to use third-party imaging software so I'm certainly no expert on Windows' built-in imaging tools...

 

[A Guy]

Windows requires you to restore to a HD that is the same size of the original, regardless of the amount of data in the image. Hopefully someone will know of a workaround. A Guy

 

[whs]

Yeah, that is a problem with many imaging programs. The free Paragon can do it though. Else I suggest you reduce the size of your current C first to a bit less than 40GBs and take an image of that. Then the restore to the 40GB partition/drive should work.
Btw: the image size is so little because of compression. The actual data size on your C was probably appr. 20GBs. The compression is usually around 50%.

 

[gregrocker]

In addition to Wolfgang's excellent suggestion of Paragon free imaging software, another good free app is Macrium Reflect. These allow more flexibility to reimage than does the built-in imaging which has only made it's debut in Win7.

If you have WD or Seagate on either end, then they also have excellent free Acronis cloning and imaging apps on their Support Downloads webpage for your HD model.

 

[whs]

I could not agree more with Greg's proposition. Free Macrium is an excellent imaging program. It can, however, not shrink an image into a smaller partition. For that you would need Macrium Pro or shrink the partition beforehand to the appropriate size. If you want to inform yourself about free Macrium, I suggest you watch my video tutorial. Another tutorial I made is about imaging strategies which is a more general outline of the odds and ends of imaging.

 

[khakiman]

well thanks unfortunately those arent valid options since the drive is dead. im going to try to find a larger hd to restore it to, resize the partition, recreate the image, then restore to teh smaller hd.

 

[gregrocker]

I believe you can shrink the image during reimaging process using free Paragon 10 Backup. Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Advanced Edition - Free Download

If not, Acronis has excellent free apps which can do this if you have a WD or Seagate HD on either end of the imaging being done: | Seagate
WD Support

 

[mjf]

Potential workaround

I highlight POTENTIAL because I've only carried out part of the process.
Ideally you would shrink the volume before imaging and avoid the hassle below.

When you made the Windows image you will find a number of vhd files equal to the number of partitions imaged.
I'll use examples I tried.
Say one of the vhds is an image of partition c: with a partition size of 456GB and used space of around 40GB.
1) Attach the vhd under disk management.
2) Shrink the mounted volume by say 250GB which becomes unallocated.
3) Image the smaller volume with Macrium
4) Extend the mounted drive to recover the unallocated region and unmount.

You end up with a macrium image which will mount via Macrium at a partition size equal to the shrunken volume. The contents look ok but I have never restored Macrium image to disk.
It may be a way to recover "lost" windows images.

I'd only try it as a last resort.

 

[Tepid]

I am not sure that would work,,, the geometry needs to be exact
If the partition/drive size is off by 1 less than the image size, or some other parameter is wrong, it will still fail on most imaging applications.

I have tried this in the past....

Try taking a 40G drive and image it.....

Then on a second larger blank drive,,, partition out a 40G partition and try to restore it.
More than likely it will fail. Something with the geometry will be messed up.

 

[whs]

I am not sure that would work,,, the geometry needs to be exact
If the partition/drive size is off by 1 less than the image size, or some other parameter is wrong, it will still fail on most imaging applications.

I have tried this in the past....

Try taking a 40G drive and image it.....

Then on a second larger blank drive,,, partition out a 40G partition and try to restore it.
More than likely it will fail. Something with the geometry will be messed up.

That's why you always have to go a few MBs smaller with the originating partition than e.g. 40GBs.

 

[mjf]

I am not sure that would work,,, the geometry needs to be exact
If the partition/drive size is off by 1 less than the image size, or some other parameter is wrong, it will still fail on most imaging applications.

I have tried this in the past....

Try taking a 40G drive and image it.....

Then on a second larger blank drive,,, partition out a 40G partition and try to restore it.
More than likely it will fail. Something with the geometry will be messed up.

That's why you always have to go a few MBs smaller with the originating partition than e.g. 40GBs.

That all makes sense.
But you can choose to shrink to a partition size some substantial size less than the available partition size you would restore to. You would end with some unallocated space in the restored partition wouldn't you? people don't seem to have problems restoring to larger partitions than the image partition size.
So I don't think this would be where it would fail.

 

[whs]

I am not sure that would work,,, the geometry needs to be exact
If the partition/drive size is off by 1 less than the image size, or some other parameter is wrong, it will still fail on most imaging applications.

I have tried this in the past....

Try taking a 40G drive and image it.....

Then on a second larger blank drive,,, partition out a 40G partition and try to restore it.
More than likely it will fail. Something with the geometry will be messed up.

That's why you always have to go a few MBs smaller with the originating partition than e.g. 40GBs.

That all makes sense.
But you can choose to shrink to a partition size some substantial size less than the available partition size you would restore to. You would end with some unallocated space in the restored partition wouldn't you? people don't seem to have problems restoring to larger partitions than the image partition size.
So I don't think this would be where it would fail.

If you end up with unallocated space, you can always extend the partition later.

But I think people usually have this sort of resizing challenge when they come from a large HDD and want to replace it by a small SSD using an image to move the OS.

 

[mjf]

If I was thinking of an SSD it would probably be 128GB because 40GB wouldn't be big enough for my needs. 64GB prob ok.
So let's say my restored image is about 40GB. I would shrink the mounted volume size down to 60GB. Then make the Macrium image.
So I'd be restoring a Macrium image made from a 60GB partition to the new 64GB SSD. Then do a bit of unallocated space cleanup.

PS: But it appears that windows images are sometimes difficult for windows to reimage yet the vhd files appear fine. If the image is important enough this could be worth a try for that purpose as well.

 

[whs]

If I was thinking of an SSD it would probably be 128GB because 40GB wouldn't be big enough for my needs. 64GB prob ok.
So let's say my restored image is about 40GB. I would shrink the mounted volume size down to 60GB. Then make the Macrium image.
So I'd be restoring a Macrium image made from a 60GB partition to the new 64GB SSD. Then do a bit of unallocated space cleanup.

That sounds about right - except I did not quite follow on the 40GB deal.

 

[mjf]

40GB is about the size of my images. Not to be confused with the OPs desire to use a 40GB ssd. If I had said my image amounted to say 30GB when restored it would fit on 40GB.
My example may have led to the confusion?

 

[whs]

40GB is about the size of my images. Not to be confused with the OPs desire to use a 40GB ssd. If I had said my image amounted to say 30GB when restored it would fit on 40GB.
My example may have led to the confusion?

OK, understand. That's because of the compression. But one must take the original size of the partition and the size of the data therein to make the computation. The compressed size is really not important in that case. It is also important to figure binary against binary because the so called 64GB disk (in decimal) is only 59.5GBs in binary.

 

[mjf]

You have to do the arithmetic - agreed.
But you'd shrink your mounted volume to a sufficient size to fit the restored image. Thus leaving some free space/slack after reimaging.

 

[Tepid]

This is why I always advise that, if you swap out any hardware (any at all) it is just always best to start from scratch and build a new image off that for restore purposes. Just makes for a cleaner system in the long run.

Reason - If something goes wrong at anytime, you are not wasting your time trying to figure out what it is only to find out that it was moving an old image to new hardware that caused the problem in the first place.

It's a CYA deal.

 

[mjf]

This is why I always advise that, if you swap out any hardware (any at all) it is just always best to start from scratch and build a new image off that for restore purposes. Just makes for a cleaner system in the long run.

Reason - If something goes wrong at anytime, you are not wasting your time trying to figure out what it is only to find out that it was moving an old image to new hardware that caused the problem in the first place.

It's a CYA deal.

It's a personal decision when to start from scratch. How much effort is involved etc.
Reasons why it could be useful
1) Windows auto image locate plays up. You know you have a load of time staggered images that you would like access to but Windows refuses to identify them. I haven't had the problem but many other have.
2) You have old images that you don't want to trash because your moving to a smaller SSD.
3) Starting from scratch could be a lot of effort particularly with a lot of paid third party software. Deactivtion/reactivation, updates to catch up on (inc. the OS) on etc...

Anyway under the right circumstances I'd give it a go.