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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?

ememorais
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3 Answers3

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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.

Moab
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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.

surfasb
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I've tried both Acronis and shrinking the VHDX. Both attempts failed miserably. I wasted hours on this. In the end I did the following:

  1. Create a new virtual machine with Hyper-V. You need to make sure that you are using the right version of vm. If your old system uses UEFI than the vm needs to be version 2. Else you need to use version 1.
  2. Boot an iso of the windows installer.
  3. Connect the physical disk containing the backup to the vm.
  4. Restore the windows system into the vm.
  5. Boot into gparted live system and shrink the disk.
  6. Backup the system again to the physical disk.

Then I could install the system on a smaller hard drive. You won't need to have the full disk space on the system running the vm since the empty disk space will be optimized away, so you need only as much free space as you are really using. This means you can probably even do it by installing a new windows system on the new drive and doing it on the same computer you eventually want to restore to. So this can be an option if all you have is the windows install disk and the computer you want to restore to. Still a really crappy and complicated solution.

Gellweiler
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