Macrium Reflect- Will Not Restore Image to a smaller drive

[Techie]

Today I had created an image for a clients PC on site, he was upgrading to an SSD drive (OCZ), of course his SSD (120GB) is smaller than his standard WD Sata drive (360GB),but he only utilized 18GB on the old SATA drive so I assumed with all of the free space remaining that Macrium would resize the new SSD partition to accommodate the smaller size.. WRONG!
Macrium instead gave a nice error saying that the new partiton was smaller than the old and could not be used...I discovered thereafter that this is an inherent trait of Macrium that the author says should be fixed in an upcoming release.
Long story short, I wasted 1 hour onsite, ended up using Acronis and all was good. ( Although I hear Acronis does not Align the sectors the way an SSD drive should be setup, I did not see any slowdown after running HD PRO and ATTO benchmarks). I also enabled AHCI in the new Win 7 image and did the same in the BIOS afterwards,I must say, SSD drives are FAST!

 

[hyfidel]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think DriveImage XML requires the same size partition to restore an image. No less, no more.

 

[MobileTechie]

DriveImage XML is like most cloning apps in that it will only restore to a partition that is the same or larger than the original.

I'm not sure which ones do it - probably Ghost I imagine.

I tend to use Parted Magic disk to clone and since it contains GParted you can resize the original partition first and then use the included CloneZilla to clone. It's a step too many but it works.

 

[lgtechcomputers]

Every hard drive manufacturer provides a tool to clone and transfer data to newer drives. Might want to consider looking at that.

I 'd say that Acronis TrueImage or Paragon Backup & Recovery should be able to do what you need. I don't like Ghost but that one should probably do it too.

 

[Techie]

I find Acronis to be getting buggier with each incarnation, though it did pull the image and resize it accordingly, it was also very slow, took about 2 hours to do the restore on an 18GB partition.
I have not tried DriveXML in about 4 years so not sure how it stacks anymore, was never a big fan of Ghost although it seems better than most.
The drive I was cloning to was an SSD from OCZ, and they do not provide any cloning software as far as I can see, I know WD actually offers Acronis for free (watered down) for pulling/imaging data but the drives must all be Western Digital.
Must take another look at Paragon B&R as well!

 

[MobileTechie]

I find Acronis to be getting buggier with each incarnation, though it did pull the image and resize it accordingly, it was also very slow, took about 2 hours to do the restore on an 18GB partition.
I have not tried DriveXML in about 4 years so not sure how it stacks anymore, was never a big fan of Ghost although it seems better than most.
The drive I was cloning to was an SSD from OCZ, and they do not provide any cloning software as far as I can see, I know WD actually offers Acronis for free (watered down) for pulling/imaging data but the drives must all be Western Digital.
Must take another look at Paragon B&R as well!

Is that right? I thought it worked that just one of the internal drives needed to be from the manufacturer?

 

[Larry Sabo]

Acronis for free (watered down) for pulling/imaging data but the drives must all be Western Digital.

Not true. You can also press <Alt>+t+o then <Enter> when the message displays saying that a WD drive was not detected. It's happy to carry on normally after doing that. At least that is the way the Seagate version (DriveWizard) works.

 

[Techie]

Thanks for the heads up, will try those keys next time!
Too bad WD doesn't mention that on thier download page.

 

[OnSiteSolutions]

Actually Macrium WILL restore to a smaller drive. You must make the Windows PE rescue disk from within Macrium, and then use robocopy and then roborestore from the PE disk. I have done this a few times and it always works.

 

[parttimetechie]

But the PE disk is only available to Paid memebers. Not so much help for us using it free. ToDo Backup is getting better and better, direct disk cloning no matter the size, win PE boot CD created in the free version and everything. Only drawback is it doesn't tell you a speed of transfer or a solid estimated completion time.