which image software can restore to a smaller partition?

Glad it did work. I guess NIS 2013 is not the only AV software that prevented making a recovery disk. Simple to disable while creating the disk, but you need to know about it.

 

Many imaging apps do sector based restores so if your original partition was....( * is sectors in use, # is immovable sectors, - is free space)

[---**----#**--]

then the target partition to restore into can not be smaller than...

[---**----#**]



Let's say the target partition was...

[------]

The best a defrag can do is...

[---**--**#----]

The best a Windows Disk Management resize can do is...

[---**--**#]

So they won't help.

These will help....

[**-**#] is an example of source partition resizing (not using Disk Management)

[****#---------] is an example of data compaction

Some imaging apps don't do sector based restores. They do compaction restores which are fine in the above example. But since most restores are to the same sized partition, these apps will compact the data when you don't want it to be compacted. Generally you want the sectors to remain in their optimized positions and not be compacted.

 

Another vote for IfL or IfW. No need to look anywhere else.

 

Check out Farstones new 2014 Recovery Tools Pe disk supports cold backups and clone and universal restore.

 

I had occasion to move my system from an HDD (120GB partition) to an SSD (60GB partition, really only 55.9GB of course).

I ran the W7 Disk Management Shrink specifying the smallest possible size, it reduced the size but that wasn't enough, so I ran it again, it reduced more but I had to run it a third time to reached the size I wanted.

I then used Shadow Protect to create an image of the HDD and had no problems when I restored it to the SSD, it booted up just fine.

I kept the HDD "as is" for awhile but never needed to use it again, it became a data backup drive in a hot swap bay.

Since then (2 years) I've moved to a 120GB system drive using Shadow Protect and it's fine too.

So, while having an imaging program that can restore to a smaller size is a "nice-to-have", it's not a big deal if it doesn't, at least not in W7, assuming that the actual data will fit in the smaller size (I've never had Vista and don't use XP anymore to know if it has "Shrink" available. I assume W8 has it, but again, I don't know).

J