Restoring an Windows system image to a smaller drive

Question

I recently had two 320GB HDDs on Raid 0 running on my main computer, and decided to split it in order to use one of the HDDs on another computer.

A windows system image of about 150GB was made on a 2TB external drive. The two 320GB disks have been formated and one of them is already in use in another computer.

When I tried to restore the image onto the formatted 320GB drive, I got an error saying that "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found".

I then learned that windows wont let system images from bigger drives (the 640GB raid 0 one) be restored to smaller ones, even if the image is smaller than the target drive. Resizing the external drive isn't really an option, since it's almost full.

Is there a way to still restore the image?

Solution 1

Use Acronis to convert the VHD image to an Acronis tib image, then use Acronis to install the tib image on the smaller drive space.

Solution 2

Window's Backups can be mounted as VHD files.

I would mount the backup file on a separate computer and resize the partition within the VHD. You'll have to use a Windows based partition manager because AFAIK GPart cannot mount VHDs.

While I am uncertain if this solution will work, it will resize the partition inside the backup file, possible alleviating the restriction you are running into.

Comments

[Psycogeek]

What was the backup program? acronis wouldnt have had that limitation, I have done all kinds of mixups with it. Also programs that can access the "image" file to change it a bit are usefull, so a person can toss something when it is an actual size problem. programs like XXclone (not xxcopy) could come in handy to shift this stuff around and still get boot, although I only tested it back before it was 7 capable.

[ememorais]

Worked great. The conversion wasn't even needed; Acronis was able to restore the image without the weird limitations of the default windows backup software.

[Neil]

I tried shrinking the partition within the VHD so that it was even smaller than the drive but I still couldn't restore it.

[Gellweiler]

Also tried this and failed.