Macrium free users - restore to a smaller partition?

I want to ask if macrium free can restore an image to a smaller partition.

I know that this ability was not there in the initial versions of macrium. But I thought that after so many years this product must had already got this feature so I tried it again today and was rather surprised to see that still it was not able to restore it to a smaller partition.

Am I missing something here?

 

Hi aigle

As far as I am aware, the partition being restored must be the same size or larger, unless they offer this in the Pro version, but I checked Macrium, and unless I missed something, the feature you asked about is not yet available, but it was mentioned in their forum that they were possibly going to look into it, and if I recall correctly, that was mentioned back in August 2013 in a post i read.

I do not use Macrium as often as I once did, but I still like the older 4.2.3775 version. That was rock solid and never failed to backup or restore properly, and the Linux boot media always worked fine. I like version 5 when I have used it, but I had some strange issues once after a restore of a complete disk...after restore, Macrium had changed my extended partition type from 15/Fh to 5/Fh if i recall correctly and I never did figure out why. Boot it mare metal from Terabyte notified me when I ran it to check the structure, that the extended data should be 15/Fh, not 5/Fh.

Just my experience with version 5, but my older version of the free Macrium was flawless the few years I used it before buying the Terabyte suite in 2012.

Hope that helps, perhaps a regular macrium user will offer their insight, but what I could find was the partition had to be same size or larger.

Jim

 

Couldn't you shrink the original partition with PartedMagic or GParted? Then use MR & restore that image.

 

In the paid version you can. I'd be surprised if they removed this in the free version.

But the last time I used this, it wasn't very clear that it's possible, because it's just slightly different from the regular restore.
I don't remember the details, but I had to use drag and drop from the source to destination drive to make it work.

 

No, it still cannot do that.

But with the use of a Windows 7 VHD (virtual hard disk) it can be done fairly easily...

Macrium + VHD = smaller partition

 

thanks for all the replies.