restoring to smaller drive
hiya,
I am a long term fan (ACRONIS BEATS NORTON HANDS DOWN !!!! NORTONS TRASHED MY BACKUP IMAGE OF SERVER 2003.. AHHHH!! DO U KNOW HOW LONG IT TAKES TO RE-INSTALL AND RE-CONFIGURE WINDOWS SERVER?) of acronis since ver 8 but found a problem when using the boot disk version, I am hoping this has been catered for in 2015 and wondering if someone can confirm that for me.
Here is what happened.
I have a PC with a 500g sata drive on which windows and various other programs such as office, photoshop etc etc are loaded, of the 500g only 160g is used, I have another drive 2tb which is used to save my docs, my pics, my videos etc (BTW its really easy to have all that stuff automatically save to another drive by default)
Anyway I purchased a 240g SSD, and tried to at first clone C: drive to the new drive, that failed because it wouldn't clone a 500g drive to a 240g drive ( i was using acronis 2013), i then tried the boot disk version of acronis same thing it wouldn't restore to a smaller drive although only 160g of the 500g drive was used, the rest was free space. it wouldn't or i didn't find a way to resize the partition on the target drive.
In the end I had to use the installed version on C: drive by creating an image on my external drive then restoring that to the new drive. It worked, but a bit of a pain compared to just cloning C: drive. and of course impossible on a laptop where you don't have the option of attaching a second drive.
(BTW using a SSD drive as C: drive has made an amazing difference to startup and run speed, in my case start from cold to logon was around 90 seconds, booting from an SSD drive it is now 15 seconds !!!! unreal !!!) this has allowed me to simply upgrade the sata drive to an SSD and the laptop is so so fast!! i don't need to buy a new one it will last years more!!!
Anyway does 2015 allow you to restore to a smaller drive using clone disk and most importantly when you use the disk you create from within Acronis can you resize partitions?
I hope what I want to achieve is clear to the reader of this , if not pls ask any clarifying question you want..
Rgds
Geoff
ok
yep its windows 7 64bit MBR
I created a disk image rather that just a partition image, unless i am wrong this should include all partitions hidden or otherwise , It has in the past but maybe that has changed ... omg i hope not!!
It looks like from your PDF that i can restore the entire drive to a smaller drive, essential when its a laptop because you don't have the option of being able to connect 2 drives at once, so you cant use the installed ver, only the boot disk to load the image to the new drive.
will upgrade to 2015 and play
rgds
Geoff
Most versons of TrueImage Home will restore to a smaller drive.
Before you start, you should open the Windows Disk Management console and review the graphical illustration (partitions displayed as rectangles) of your system disk.
You need to know their sizes, their partition names and their sequence of listings.
If you are going to use the signature link 3, item 2 inside that link,
when you get to the last screen of the restore, your option will be
CANCEL or PROCEED.
That is the summary page. It will show the projected partition sizes.
The only partition that should be changed in size is the
Windows user partition or a DATA partition. The Recovery or System Reserved sizes should not be changed.
In Windows, your system user disk is drive C but in the Recovery CD, it may be another drive letter.
Do not use the drive letter as your guide. Use partition name and partition sizes to help choose the correct partitions.
If the summary page shows that some partitions are being restored to the wrong sizes,
you should use the Cancel option and restore each partition singly as per my guide item 1.
hmm
ok that confused me a bit, I will have a think and read more and will probably understand it.
You say in your reply that most versions of true image home will allow you to restore to a smaller disk, i agree that if you are working with the installed version, yes that works and in fact you can resize the partition to bigger drives and leave unallocated space to later create another partition of a different type etc. That i understand and have done.
But my problem was I had a laptop that had a normal sata drive in it that was getting on in age and because there is heaps and heaps of essential stuff on it and i use it and update data (invoices especially) on a daily basis i didn't want to wait until it started to fail before i replaced it, also because SSD's have dropped radically in price I chose to replace the Standard Sata drive with a SS sata drive) so what i did was connect my external usb drive to the laptop, did a full disk image.
I then removed the old drive from the laptop connected the new SSD, obviously i could not access the installed version of acronis as i can only connect one HD at a time to a laptop, (hmm ok after i typed that i just realized i could have put the old HD into a usb case and still booted windows and thus acronis that way albeit very slow) anyway i used the acronis boot disk to start the laptop and then tried to recover the disk image to the new SSD, it gave me a error message in red writing that told me i couldn't recover to a smaller disk and I didn't see and couldn't find a way to change the partition size.
In the end i connected the new SSD to my desktop and then recovered using the "full" version (installed version) of acronis where i could do whatever i liked with the partitions. (and yes i do have multiple licenses for acronis) but really i would think a lot of ppl don't have a desktop to connect the drive to and do it or the knowledge for that matter.
anyway
Syb
Take a look at my signature link 3, item 1 inside that link. This will enable to to control each partition size.
Take another look at my recommendation of post #1 which demonstrates using the TI Recovery CD to perform the restore.
This guide shows how to restore single partiton per single restore until all partitions restored using multiple restores. Each partition is restored to user controlled partition sizes.
If you have 4 partitions, then 4 restores are needed--each partition on a separate restore except all restores are done from the one initial bootup into the CD. The guide will show you how to reduce the partition size as part of the restore. Normally, no change of size is used for the System Reserved, nor the Recovery partition. Only the Windows user partition is make smaller, and perhaps a DATA partition if one exists.