Restoring Windows 7 and to a smaller hard drive

[kgoolsby]

Greetings:

Let me give a little background first.

We have some PCs we want to create a backup image of on a regular basis. That way if the PC dies we can get another PC (same make and model) and restore that image so the user can continue to work with minimal downtime. The only thing that may be different is the hard drive. I downloaded the 30 day trial of IFW. I took an image from a 1TB hard drive on a dell 990. I went to restore that image to another 990 with a 300GB hard drive. I am unable to restore and get an error that the drive is not big enough. When I look at the image file it is only 18GB. I did try the various resize settings and they were no help.

The way I restoring the backup is by PXE booting to TBWinRe and using IFW. From there I browse to the network part of the image file and start the restore. When I click on start (or OK to the partition message) is when I get the error. Now if use a dell 990 with a 1TB hard drive I can restore the image but the PC will not boot.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thanks for any assistance.

[Brian K]

Have you had a look at this?

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=554

For restoring to different hardware, tbidtool.tbs makes it easy. It's in the paid version.