Solved System Image Recovery to new SSD Issues

I am trying to replace my current system 320GB hard drive with a smaller 256GB crucial SSD and I am getting an error (see attached) when I try to restore the image to the new SSD. I am not sure where to go from here.

To give a little background, I shrunk the volume of my 320GB partition to 195GB to avoid issues with an image recovery to a smaller hard drive. I also created a 100GB partition on my Seagate 1TB external drive that I used to create the system image. I used the built in "Windows 7 file recovery" tool to create the image on the external drive and also to create the bootable recovery cd. When I restored the image everything went exactly as planned until it failed in Step 13 (after clicking "finish") shown in the tutorial I found on this forum:

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...overy-restore-image-computer-windows-8-a.html

Here is the error message I get:


After doing some research, this is the same error people are getting from trying to restore an image to a smaller hard drive, however I repartitioned the drive prior so the image should be smaller than the new hard drive so I'm confused as to why that would be the issue. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Might want to try using Macrium Reflect Free to create and restore the image. Do it from a booted CD rather that from Windows 8 itself.

I've done this with Acronis True Image Home 2012 and it's worked so it is doable.

Also, can you post a screen shot of Disk Management showing the old partitioned drive?

+1 for Macrium Reflect. The newer versions work well with Windows 8.

Ztruker said:

Might want to try using Macrium Reflect Free to create and restore the image. Do it from a booted CD rather that from Windows 8 itself.

I've done this with Acronis True Image Home 2012 and it's worked so it is doable.

Also, can you post a screen shot of Disk Management showing the old partitioned drive?

Click to expand...

Here is the disk management shot:

That agrees with what you said about shrinking the partition, so definitely give Macrium Reflect Free a try.

Macrium should be fine.

Ther are several other good ones - Aomei backuper is very easy to use and makes it's own winpe boot media without needing the huge WAIK/WADK download.

Direct-Backuper.exe

AOMEI's free data backup software for disk, partition, system and file backup & recovery for Windows Oss.


Paragon free is also very good - it comes with linux based boot media.

Free Backup Software: Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition - Overview

You can use this to make bootable winpe media from paragon

PARAGONPEv4.zip

The Windows Backup will normally restore an image to a drive with at least as much space as the partitioned space on the original drive. But, if I remember correctly, that is based on the partitions being set up in a contiguous manner.

I believe the fact you have unallocated space between the partitions, forces the backup to take that space into account. So, in your situation, a third party may work better, or you could try to move the partition, or create a new one and move the data, then remove the current Recovery partition.

Having a good backup image allows for more flexibility when experimenting with solutions, so basically, you can play if you want.

The Macrium Reflect free software worked perfectly, thanks everyone.