Problem with restoring to slightly different harddrive

Hi. Hope someone will know, what I am talking about...

I am in the possession of 35 identical OEM preinstalled notebooks (Compaq CQ61) that all needs to be adjusted for the purposes of the company I'm working for.

I have gone through the entire setup procedure with one of them and then made an image, which I have copied out to three usb harddrives. I have then used a recovery cd with each of the 35 machines and restored the image to all of them, that is, except one. (By the way, don't worry about licensing, I've got that covered.)

The notebooks seem to have been equipped with three or four slightly different harddrive models, which didn't seem to present a problem, as 34 out of 35 are working flawlessly as exact clones. But there is this one computer (which may have been in use before, I don't know) which does not at all act the same as the others upon trying to restore the image in the Paragon recovery environment!

Normally I would load the image which is 30.8 GB and in the disk info overview I would see it replacing the roughly 24 GB of used disk space on the 258 GB target partition - everything looks just as expected, the drive retains its drive letter, and applying the image takes less than 20 minutes.

With this machine, however, the result of loading the image is that the partition info says that there is 7.8 MB (megabytes) of used disk space and also that the partition loses its drive letter; the original size of the harddrive and of the partitions on it, though, appears to be the same as on the other computers (at least in terms of gigabytes, I haven't checked the exact number of bytes).

If I then choose to apply the image anyway, it runs for 7.5 hours, copying all files one by one and end up with 34.5 GB of used disk space! Booting from the internal harddisk the image seem to have been applied allright, but I am very much hesitant to accept the extra used space! It all seems very fishy to me - and repeating the restoring procedure just brings me back to the initial strange behavior.

I may likely have missed some setting for restoring an image to a different harddrive, but I don't think the recovery software ought to behave this way. Can someone give me an explanation and maybe a solution??

Thanks!

 

Hello Dalgard,

If the restore is taking much longer (5 times approximately) and scrolls to list all the files, this indicates that you are doing a file level restore. Only time this occurs is when you are restoring a file-level backup, or to a smaller partition/hard disk than its original. The 7.8 MB might have been the culprit to put the image over the top, and it's now considered restoring to smaller. Also, an additional partition would reassign the drive letters out of order. However, the letterings assigned in Paragon does not match the ones of Windows since we don't read off of the Windows registry.