Restore to smaller HD on Dell Laptop

Hello,

I am looking for some guidance regarding the steps I need to to take
to perform a complete restore on my Dell Latitude C810.

My old drive (ATA/IDE 48 GB) is larger than my new drive (ATA/IDE 40 GB).
The new drive is completely new from the manufaturer.

I have a full image with all partitions (including MBR and a Dell diagnostics partition) on my network drive that I created with Acronis True Image Home.
The image conatins about 15 GB of data so that although the new disk is somewhat smaller it will easily be able to hold the old content.

I also have created a boot CD.

My laptop can only hold one HD at a time.

My plan is to do the following:

1)
Replace the old drive with the new one in the laptop.

2)
Boot Acronis from the CD.

3)
Recover the complete disk (all partitions) from the archive on the network
drive.

Is there anything I need to look out for due to the different sizes in disks?
Can anyone guide me through the steps to make this works out?

Thanks in advance and regards,
Mario

 

As long as the bootable TI CD will see the backup file on the network the size shouldn't matter at all.

 

Ralphie,

will TIH actually take care of resizing etc?

What about the MBR? I though that might cause problems due to
the different size HDs?

In any case, I'm in the process of restoring...

Thanks,
Mario

 

If you had a check mark against the Disk 1 name then the mbr will be backed up as well. You need to do this to have a successful Recovery - makes things a lot easier than having to jump through hoops if the mbr is not included.

 

It worked!

I did have a check mark on the entire disc.

After the restore and re.boot, windows reported a new hardware (the new disc). I had to reboot again, but without any problems whatsoever.

The then new disc has beenr recognized with its smaller size by XP
and I'm set to go.

First thing I did was create a new image.....;-))))

Thanks again,
Mario

 

Good to hear of successes in here for a change.