Restoring to smaller drive (RAID0 to RAID1)

I've read a few threads here that seem to indicate that it IS possible to restore an image to a smaller physical drive provided the size of the image is fits the destination. Yet, I can't get this to work.

Here is my situation:
- My system is 2 x 300GB drives striped in RAID0 (so 600GB of space) with about 60GB of actual files.
- For backup I have a 1 TB external USB drive

I am able to back up the RAID0 image using Paragon Backup no problem.
I can restore the image back on the RAID0 no problem. So, at least I know all the drives are OK.

However, what I want to do is convert my system to RAID1 (mirroring) so that the net space is only going to be 300GB. Plenty of room for the 60GB image still.

The problem is, the restore wizard only restores the small 100MB system partition. It sees that the destination drive is now only 300GB and since this doesn't match the 600GB of the drive that was imaged, it won't proceed. I do get an error message that "because of this mismatch, some data might be lost", then it allows me to go ahead anyway - which I have tried - but the 60GB partition does not get restored.

Any ideas?

 

Do you have software RAID configuration or Hardware RAID?

 

The RAID controller is on the motherboard.

 

You should use WinPE Recovery CD to restore RAIDed configurations.

Please make sure that the recovery CD you use is WinPE-based (created from separate self-burning image in *.exe file).

Once booted from WinPE Recovery CD, select "Add drivers" option and upload unpacked Win7 32-bit RAID drivers for your controller.

Once drivers added, run Backup program in full scale and make sure that RAID is recognized as single drive in Disk Map.

Then run Restore wizard and check if it works.

If it still fails to restore entire HDD image, try the following:
* Restore System Reserved partition
(please switch to "show partitions" view at the stage of selecting image to restore)
* Restore Windows partition
* Restore other partitions (if needed)

Check if it works.

 

Thanks for all the tips. After trying all of the above recommendations and a few others I finally gave up.

I just backed up, file-by-file, all my documents. I reset the RAID setup in the BIOS and just reinstalled Win7. Not a very elegant solution to be sure, but at some point, the time spent trying to find a smoother way to do it was far exceeding just reinstalling and reconfiguring all my settings.