Recovery smaller Target drive grayed out
Hello, My goal is to backup my complete Main Hard drive onto another Hard drive (Backup) so if my main Hard drive crashes, I can just swap Hard drives and I am ready to go again with everything as it was on the original Hard drive.
So I bought Acronis True Image 2019. My system is 64 Bit Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. The Main Hard drive (OS and Applications etc..) is a 1.5 TB with 195 GB used. (In Windows it shows as 1.17 TB free of 1.36 TB).
With the Acronis application in Windows, I created a Full drive .tib backup file. (_full_b1_s1_v1) ~ 111 GB. I also created a rescue recovery disk.
I pulled my Main Hard drive out of the PC and replaced it with a (Backup) Hard drive to install the recovery onto. The installed the Backup Hard drive is a 750 GB drive with 695 GB usable free space.
I booted up the computer with the Acronis Recovery disk, then used the “Add new Hard drive” menu to format the Backup Hard drive with one whole drive NTFS partition. Then I used the Recovery wizard to pick the .tib file and then under “What to recover”, select the whole disk which automatically selects the partitions within. When it comes to “Destination of Disk” then all other drives are grayed out except the drive the .tib file is on.
I know my desired destination Hard drive is smaller than the original main Hard drive, but the “used” size of the original main hard drive is only 195 GB plus the second 200 MB boot partition so that should easily fit on the smaller Backup Hard drive.
If I go back to “What to recover” and select individually the two partitions only, then target drive is visible for the smaller 200 MB partition but no drives are visible as target for the rest of the drive partition which is 1.36 TB but has only 195 GB used.
In the “What to recover” window it shows that the main partition is 1.364 TB and has only 195 GB used space, but it seems to see it as too big for the designation drive?
I though you are supposed to be able to backup a whole hard drive to a smaller drive as long as the “used” drive size is smaller than the target drive and it would resize the partitions automatically? That’s why I bought Acronis.


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There is also something strange in the last screenshot. It shows a drive with aprox 750gig (Disk 1 - would be attached to SATA port 0 and shown as on port 0 under windows) which has the expected partitions if the recovery had been successful. How did the 3 partitions get on that drive, which I understand to be the new drive.
Ian
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Thank you, Enchantech, I did not use sector by sector. My backup .tib file is ~ 111 GB as expected (a little smaller than the used data of the original drive).
Thank you, IanL-S, I tried different methods. - In that case, under "What to recover", I selected the 3 partitions ( 1. "NTFS (OS) (C:)"; 2. "MBR and Track 0"; 3. "NTFS (System)") individually, and also created two partitions on the destination drive when I used "Add new Hard drive". Was just trying different things.
Rick
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Can you provide your machine specs please? Specifically make and model.
Do you know if your motherboard has more than one drive controller? Many do such as Intel and Marvell for example.
Your second screenshot shows both disk 1 and disk 2 attached to ATA port (0). Master. This indicates that you are using IDE drives and both are set to Master which would confuse the application I think. You might try setting the target drive (750GB) as Slave and see if that will get the app to allow you to select it as a destiinatiion.
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