Restoring image to smaller drive: won't boot.

[snkscore]

My main drive in my laptop is 300GB, with like 60GB of data on it now that I have removed most of it.

I am borrowing a solid state drive from a friend to see how much performance gain I would experience if I bought my own.

I plugged in a USB drive, and created an acronis image of my full drive to a file on the USB drive.

I think plugged in the solid state drive into an external housing and selected that drive as the restore destination.

When I picked to restore, I selected the partition and the MBR checkboxes.

But after restoring the image (which works enough for me to read the files off the the solid state drive when it is plugged into the external housing) I can't boot from that drive after putting it into my laptop.

Any suggestions?

[Brian K]

snkscore,

Quick question. What brand is your laptop? It does matter.

[MudCrab]

Did you try installing the SSD into the laptop and doing the restore to it? Some laptops use non-standard drive geometry and the destination drive must be using the internal connection in order to work properly.

[snkscore]

Originally Posted by MudCrab

Did you try installing the SSD into the laptop and doing the restore to it? Some laptops use non-standard drive geometry and the destination drive must be using the internal connection in order to work properly.

No, I didn't know that was an option.

I think I can create a boot disk through the acronis software right? Can I use that to pull the image file from a USB drive and write it onto the drive in the laptop?

[DwnNdrty]

Originally Posted by snkscore

No, I didn't know that was an option.

I think I can create a boot disk through the acronis software right? Can I use that to pull the image file from a USB drive and write it onto the drive in the laptop?

Yes, in fact, that is how you should do a restore so that you know whether the Rescue CD (as the bootable True Image cd is called) can see the Backup Image on the usb drive - not all do as some users have found out when it is too late.

[snkscore]

Originally Posted by DwnNdrty

Yes, in fact, that is how you should do a restore so that you know whether the Rescue CD (as the bootable True Image cd is called) can see the Backup Image on the usb drive - not all do as some users have found out when it is too late.

That did it!

Thanks!

WOW, I can't believe how fast this solid state drive is. Amazing.

[Brian K]

snkscore,

Good news. What is the brand of your laptop so we can add it to our list?

[snkscore]

Originally Posted by Brian K

snkscore,

Good news. What is the brand of your laptop so we can add it to our list?

Lenovo T61p

[Brian K]

Thanks. It's already on the list. IBM/Lenovo, HP and Compaq have 240 heads HD geometry and require the reverse clone procedure you performed.