Macrium Reflect Free Help

[poison]

Hi all, I have just ordered an SSD hard drive for my old notebook to make it a little quicker. The old drive is a 149GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 which will be replaced by a OCZ VTX4-25SAT3-128G. My question is can I simply make an image of the current disk and restore that image to the new HD using Macrium Reflect Free or am I right in thinking with the new HD being dissimilar hardware I will need to buy the pro version?

I recall in the past I tried something similar with Acronis (which supposedly supported restore to dissimilar hardware) and the restore failed. But Acronis let me down a few times anyway which is why I now use Macrium...

Any advice would be grateful

[OldMX]

Just create a macrium image of the disk to an external drive and restore to ssd, nothing complicated. dont clone from inside windows, it will be a mess.

[poison]

Thank you I do appreciate your quick response... I did think it would be as simple as that to be honest... It's just with it being a different brand and size hard drive disk plus Acronis letting me down in a similar situation before I thought that I may have run into problems again without the dissimilar hardware support of the pro version.

Thanks!

[OldMX]

Anytime!

[philby]

The old drive is a 149GB Seagate which will be replaced by a OCZ 128G.

As far as I know, you can't restore to a smaller drive without using RoboRestore as per here.

If I'm out of date, can anyone confirm for the OP that RoboRestore is no longer required?

philby

[poison]

Originally Posted by philby

The old drive is a 149GB Seagate which will be replaced by a OCZ 128G.

As far as I know, you can't restore to a smaller drive without using RoboRestore as per here.

If I'm out of date, can anyone confirm for the OP that RoboRestore is no longer required?

philby

Thanks, that's worth knowing... I created an image of the disk using the Windows PE Macrium Rescue Media CD. According to the article you posted RoboRestore is included.

Note: RoboRestore is already included with the Macrium Windows PE rescue CD. From the Windows PE command prompt type:

x:
"x:\program files\macrium\roborestore.exe"

If I have any problems with a regular restore wizard (hopefully I don't) I now know what to try first, and hopefully that will work out okay.

Thanks again!

[Sully]

I have always found it best to create a small OS drive/partition, so that my images are always smaller than any new drive.

I use Partition Wizard these days to resize an existing drive/partition, then create my macrium image, then use either PE or the macrium ISOLinux cd to restore using macrium restore wizard.

Works great, no failures yet.

Sul.

[OldMX]

My bad, didnt notice the mismatching sizes, use disk management to reduce disk size to whatever is the minimal allowed, then image it, exchange disks and restore image, once it boots to windows, with disk management expand partition to whatever space is available.

[poison]

Originally Posted by Sully

I have always found it best to create a small OS drive/partition, so that my images are always smaller than any new drive.

I use Partition Wizard these days to resize an existing drive/partition, then create my macrium image, then use either PE or the macrium ISOLinux cd to restore using macrium restore wizard.

Works great, no failures yet.

Sul.

That sounds like a good idea and sounds like should prevent any problems with restoring to the new, smaller drive. I have just downloaded Partition Wizard, I will resize the disk to what I am using +10GB, create an image and restore to the new hard drive using PE like you say.

Thanks for the extra input, Sul, with the advice here I'm hopeful I'll have no failure(s) tomorrow when I swap the drives over

[poison]

Originally Posted by OldMX

My bad, didnt notice the mismatching sizes, use disk management to reduce disk size to whatever is the minimal allowed, then image it, exchange disks and restore image, once it boots to windows, with disk management expand partition to whatever space is available.

Will do. Thanks again!

[Sully]

Originally Posted by poison

That sounds like a good idea and sounds like should prevent any problems with restoring to the new, smaller drive. I have just downloaded Partition Wizard, I will resize the disk to what I am using +10GB, create an image and restore to the new hard drive using PE like you say.

Thanks for the extra input, Sul, with the advice here I'm hopeful I'll have no failure(s) tomorrow when I swap the drives over

If it were me, I would make an image of the drive, using high compression, and store it on usb drive or such. Then I would mess with resizing the drive down to smaller than the new drive. I have seen issues with resizing, so if you have a lot to lose, play it safe.

That being said, I usually make my baseline images around 40gb, so that no matter what happens, a new drive (or an old one if thats all I have) will always be bigger than what the image is from. Macrium makes it easy to work with because you can choose to use the entire new disc without needing to resize it after you restore.

Sul.

[poison]

Originally Posted by Sully

If it were me, I would make an image of the drive, using high compression, and store it on usb drive or such. Then I would mess with resizing the drive down to smaller than the new drive. I have seen issues with resizing, so if you have a lot to lose, play it safe.

That being said, I usually make my baseline images around 40gb, so that no matter what happens, a new drive (or an old one if thats all I have) will always be bigger than what the image is from. Macrium makes it easy to work with because you can choose to use the entire new disc without needing to resize it after you restore.

Sul.

That's exactly what I've done. I've just inserted the new drive and Macrium Reflect is at 13% of the restore as we speak. Hopefully it completes without error. I'll report back here when and if that completes successfully. With your advice I don't see why it shouldn't.

[poison]

The restore was a success

Thanks one more time to each of you for helping and making it an easy and successful process.