Skip to main content

how to recover disk image to smaller drive (NOT Clone)

Thread needs solution

Hiya,

I did a backup of the entire computer which had 2 hard drives one for windows, one for data, the common folders like pictures, videos etc already had their location moved from c: drive to E: (the data drive)

the data drive was 1 terrabyte although only 43 gig was used, i need to recover this image to a new drive which is only 120g however when i goto do that aronis tells me the destination drive is too small.

the original 1 terrabyte drive has been wiped and is in use in another computer, i didnt really want to buy another drive just to recover to then use the Clone function (which can recover to smaller drive) to move data across to the smaller drive.

I tried mounting the image in the hope it would show up as a drive and i could then use clone but it doesnt appear so i guess clone only shows physical drives.

so any idea's how to do it?

 

Rgds

Geoff

0 Users found this helpful

Geoff wrote:

I did a backup of the entire computer which had 2 hard drives one for windows, one for data, the common folders like pictures, videos etc already had their location moved from c: drive to E: (the data drive) 
the data drive was 1 terrabyte although only 43 gig was used, i need to recover this image to a new drive which is only 120g however when i goto do that aronis tells me the destination drive is too small.
the original 1 terrabyte drive has been wiped and is in use in another computer, i didnt really want to buy another drive just to recover to then use the Clone function (which can recover to smaller drive) to move data across to the smaller drive.
I tried mounting the image in the hope it would show up as a drive and i could then use clone but it doesnt appear so i guess clone only shows physical drives.

Geoff, you will need to boot your system from the Acronis bootable Rescue Media in the same mode as your Windows OS boots, i.e. if this was a BIOS / MBR system in that mode, or else if a UEFI / Secure Boot that way.  

Clone only operates on entire disk drives and cannot be used to copy selected partitions - it is either all or nothing.

You should be able to restore your backup image to your new 120GB drive by installing this new drive in the same place where the original 1TB drive was located, then restoring the required OS partitions to that drive from your backup drive when booted from the Rescue Media.  You need to ensure that if this is a Windows Vista, 7, 8 or later OS, that you restore the System Reserved partition / UEFI partition if present as well as your OS partition, plus you will need to either user automatic resizing or manually resize the OS partition to fit.

Hiya,

yep that worked, didnt have to restore the OS disk just the data disk.

surprised recover only works to smaller disks with the boot media not from within the program, maybe thats something Acronis can look into for the next version.

 

rgds

Geoff