Hello again, all. I have installed G12 and made a recovery point. Now i need to use it, since my laptop hard drive has corrution that can't be repaired. I took this opportunity to practice while waiting for the new drive to arrive. I booted to the recovery environment and tried to recover just to make sure it worked. I noticed that "resize restored drive" is greyed out and can't be checked. My recovery point has 26g and the drive to which it is expanding is 80g. Why is this option not active? Is it because the drive has data on it and isn't fresh? Will I have this option active on my new drive, unformated and not partitioned? This issue is not referenced in the user guide, which implies that if you use the software you can check expand drive if desired. No mention is made of different handling of new vs used drives.

I can't believe I am responding to my own post. Usually, someone has an opinion, often very helpful. I see quite a few readers, but not one response. Come on folks, you will have this issue also sooner or later. Help, please, are moderators out there?

Patience. Busy people. Your subject title is not very compelling (vague). I almost passed myself. Better would be: "Restoring Recovery Point to new Laptop Hard drive with Ghost 12". That's more interesting, cuz it's something lots of ppl wanna know about.

Do you have the same drive still in the laptop? In that case you wouldn't need to resize. Can't say for sure, but Ghost may detect this and adjust your options appropriately.

Once the new drive arrives, you'll know more.

I am interested in your findings, as this is a common operation. Your back-up image is stored on an external drive?

Rad.Test wrote on Mar 25^th, 2008 at 9:16am:

Do you have the same drive still in the laptop? In that case you wouldn't need to resize. Can't say for sure, but Ghost may detect this and adjust your options appropriately.

I agree with Rad.  I think the reason the option is greyed out is that you have the same hard drive in your laptop (which can't obviously be enlarged).  When you put a new blank larger hard drive in, and boot from the cd, you should see the option to enlarge on restore.

Thanks for the comments. I wish I could change the title of my post, because you are right about it being vague. Now that I have peaked your interest, here is the rest of the story.
I have 2 laptop drives for the same computer. Drive 1 is 30 g, drive 2 is 80g.
I have created a recovery point for each drive. Therefore, I believe that 1 recovery point thinks the parent drive has 30 g, and the other recovery point thinks the parent drive has 80g.
After the 80 g drive showed sector errors, I opened the 30 g drive restore point and attemptetd to restore to the still operational but flawed 80 g  drive. I think the program should say, you are puting a 30g backup onto an 80g drive. New or used, since 80 g is bigger than the 30g restore point, I should have had the option to enlarge, but it was greyed out. I then switched to the restore point created from the 80g drive and tried to restore and it was also greyed out. This latter result makes sense based on what you said, but the first result doesn't. In addition, at some point in my efforts, not only was enlarge greyed out, but also check for errors and restore mbr was grey. UInfortunately, by then I was confused and forgot to note the particulars.
As an aside, if the enlargment is automatic, what happens if you want to create partitions and don't want it to enlarge? Also, If my restore point was created from an 80 g drive that was only using 18g of data, and my new drive was smaller, say 20g, how would the downsizing work?

Are you able to run both drives at the same time? Or can you only swap one at a time? (like me)

Each drive contains only a single partition?

["peaked" = piqued interest]

rleescott wrote on Mar 25^th, 2008 at 11:27am:

I wish I could change the title of my post,

Go back to your first post, and select Modify from the right hand side.  Then change the title, then save.

Hey, someone changed the title already. I guess a moderator. Thanks. Regarding the most recent comment, I can only use 1 drive at a time on my laptop, and each has 1 partition, c drive. I use the newer 80g and keep the cloned 30 g, which was the original, as a backup. I made a g12 recovery point for each drive, just in case.

Where are your back-up images stored?

Brian has experience with this type of stuff. Maybe send him a PM with a link to this thread.

rleescott wrote on Mar 25^th, 2008 at 11:27am:

I think the program should say, you are puting a 30g backup onto an 80g drive.

I think (but not sure) that the option to enlarge the partition to fill the hard drive is only available when you're restoring to a new/blank/unformatted hard drive.

In your case, was there 80 gb of completely unused unallocated partition space?  Or just a formatted but not used partition?

Sometimes advanced partition utilities are needed to rearrange and manipulate and merge etc.  Such as Partition Magic 8 from Symantec as well as others from Acronis or Paragon.

I tried wiping the entire drive so that it was unformatted and unpartitioned with the same result in terms of greyed out option to expand the recovery point to fill the entire new drive. That makes me believe i will have the same problem with the new drive.That is not to say that if I let it run it wouldn't expand by some automatic feature that i don't understand. I am concerned that I don't have the option to tell it to go either way in what seems to be a very simple transfer. I know that parttition programs exist, but G12 was touted as better than some of the existing cloners because of its ability to expand to a larger drive. All I want is for my 20g of data to fully expand to the 80 g drive, and also to the 30g drive if I choose to use it as a backup.  I do not use partitions.                  
My recovery points are stored on an external usb drive.
Brian has helped in the past, but i don't know how to contact him or if he is available.

Here's Brian's profile:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?action=viewprofile;username=7848535B5465713A0

He lives on the other side of the world, so is probably sleeping when you're awake (if you live in the US).

rleescott wrote on Mar 25^th, 2008 at 4:46pm:

I tried wiping the entire drive so that it was unformatted and unpartitioned with the same result in terms of greyed out option to expand the recovery point to fill the entire new drive.

Seems like that should have the resize option available.

Just to clarify:
1. You have a laptop with internal 30gb hard drive (and backup recovery point on usb2 drive)
2. You removed the 30 gb drive, zerod a spare 80gb drive, and installed the 80gb drive in the laptop.
3. You booted from the Ghost 12 Recovery Cd.
4. You asked Ghost 12 to "recover my computer" and then pointed to the 30gb backup as the source, and unformatted internal hard drive as the target.
5. The option is greyed out?

Do I have everything exactly correct?

rleescott,

I'm a little confused too and answers to Ghost4me's question should clear it in my brain.

"Resize restored drive" applies to having Unallocated Space left over. So if you image a 30 GB partition and restore to a 30 GB partition, there will never be any Unallocated Space left over and the option will be greyed out. If you were restoring to a 40 GB partition then the option would be available. It's not dependent on how much data is in the partition or the size of the backup image (recovery point).

Were you planning to have more than one partition on your new HD? I think an OS and a data partition makes a lot of sense.

PS Are you trying to restore the 30 GB partition image to the 80 GB HD?

Are you using Vista?

Brian, nice to see you in the loop.
Ghost4 me, your summary is correct.
Let me resummarize, just in case i have been unclear.
I am using xp, sp2 and my laptop started out with a 30g drive. I backed it up w G12. At the time the 30G drive had 18g of data and produced a recovery point using recommended compression in the range of 15g. Call this clone 1.
Then I acquired an 80g drive,new, and tried to recover clone 1 to the new 80g drive. It worked, but the expand option was greyed out, but i did it anyway. It produced a c drive of 30g, not 80g. Since I don't want multiple partitions, this was a waste of new space for me. From what I understand, the expand option should have been available, correct?
I then used terrabyte copy/wipe that Brian provided to clone 30g original to the 80g drive. It worked perfectly. I then created a recovery point from the 80g drive, which had 18g of data compressed to approx 15g. Call this clone 2. I saved both.
Now the new 80g drive is failing with bad sectors, so I am getting a new 80g drive. In the meantime i am playing with the 80g.
I attempted to use clone2 to recover the 80g drive. Expand was greyed out. I think Brian is saying, since the recovery point was made from an 80g parttition, and it's restoring to an 80g partition, expand should not be an option.Is this correct? If this is true, what if I wanted to create a 40 g partition of clone 2 and have 40g of parttionD in the 80g drive? How would I do this?
Anyway, I then switched to clone 1, which came from a 30g drive, single partition,and went thru the process of restoring to the 80g drive. As I understand, the option to expand should not have been grey, but it was.
Would the expansion occur anyway in either case?
Also, if I use clone2, which came from the 80g drive and recover it to the 30g smaller drive, will the program do it, because the recipient is smaller, as long as the data is less than 30g? Or will it think that the original partition was 80g, and therefore say I can't copy to a smaller drive?
Hope this helps clarify the issues.

rleescott wrote on Mar 26^th, 2008 at 9:26am:

From what I understand, the expand option should have been available, correct?

Yes I think it should be.  Must be a bug in Ghost 12.  You basically have two options I would say:
1. Contact Symantec free LiveChat and see if this is a known problem and if they have a fix.

2. Get a partition manager product to do the resize manually.

FYI, I've had a few problems myself with Ghost xx not resizing when I wanted it to, but I have Partition Manager 8, so it wasn't a big deal.  The other advantage of PM8 is that you can resize your partitions to exactly the size you want.

This also doesn't help you, but for future, Vista has built in extend volume and shrink volume functions built into the Disk Management.  Again not everything that PM8 or similar software has, but a nice improvement.

This list is my no means exhaustive, but here are 3 popular Partition Manger programs:

Norton PartitionMagic 8.0

Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 Personal

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0

(Caution:  Always be sure you have a good verified image backup before modifying any partition!)

Finally, here is a list of "free" partition utilities.  I have no experience with these; list provided as is:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/partitioneditors.shtml

rleescott wrote on Mar 26^th, 2008 at 9:26am:

Then I acquired an 80g drive,new, and tried to recover clone 1 to the new 80g drive. It worked, but the expand option was greyed out, but i did it anyway. It produced a c drive of 30g, not 80g. Since I don't want multiple partitions, this was a waste of new space for me. From what I understand, the expand option should have been available, correct?

Correct. Something is amiss. In an earlier post you mentioned ..


Quote:

not only was enlarge greyed out, but also check for errors and restore mbr was grey.

Strange too.

See if you get the same results with the new HD. The current 80 GB HD has bad sectors and maybe that accounts for the greyed out choices. Or maybe not.

Just restore the image to the new HD and if it only occupies 30 GB we can talk you through expanding the partition to any size you desire. It's easy and the software will be free.

Thanks, Brian. Could you give us the info on the free partition software, anyway. Sounds like a good tool.
Can you comment on this question from my previous post?
Also, if I use clone2, which came from the 80g drive and recover it to the 30g smaller drive, will the program do it, because the recipient is smaller, as long as the data is less than 30g? Or will it think that the original partition was 80g, and therefore say I can't copy to a smaller drive?

rleescott,

Parted Magic 2.1

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

Some instructions.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1191223327/4#4


Quote:

Also, if I use clone2, which came from the 80g drive and recover it to the 30g smaller drive, will the program do it, because the recipient is smaller, as long as the data is less than 30g? Or will it think that the original partition was 80g, and therefore say I can't copy to a smaller drive?

I haven't used clone2. When cloning to a smaller partition, you can only resize to the position of the last sector in use.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#15

See, "Why won't 5GB of data clone to a 10GB partition?"

OK. So if I have a 30 g drive with a recovery point and I install it to an 80g drive and create a new recover point for the 80g drive, I should save both recovery points. This is so I can tranfer the 30g recovery to a 40g drive in the future, which I can't do with the 80g drive recovery point? This could easily occur for those who have very large drives, eg 250, and find that they can get a good deal on a 150g, which is suitable for their needs. Is this correct?
Thanks for the link to the parted magic. I think I will need advice when I need to use it.

rleescott,

Let's say you have a 250 GB HD containing 20 GB of data. You can get a 30 GB HD for $1 and you would like to restore your image to the smaller HD and use the larger HD elsewhere. Easy to do.

With Parted Magic you resize the 250 GB partition to 30 GB. Create an image of the 30 GB partition. Restore that image to the 30 GB HD.

A less reliable way is to defrag the 250 GB partition before creating the image. If you are lucky (unlikely) and all of the data has been moved inside the first 30 GB of the partition, then this image will restore to a 30 GB HD.

Does this mean that a person who creates a g12 image(recovery point) of an 80g drive, single partition, and then has a drive failure so that it isn't possible to adjust the drive partitiion size, and who thinks that he can just get a new drive and restore to it, is wrong? By that, I mean, must he acquire a drive of equal or greater size or recovery will not work? This would be important for all to know.
Also, I have terrabyte copy/wipe that you linked. I have successfully copied drives with it. Will it take a large partitiion on an 80g drive holding 20g data and copy it to a 30g drive?

It depends on the position of the last sector in use. You can certainly restore that image to an 80 GB or larger HD but you may be lucky and be able to restore to a much smaller HD. So defrag your OS partition before creating an image. This helps prevent used sectors towards the end of the partition.

I think the same reasoning applies to CopyWipe but I'm not certain.

Ok. I will check when the new drive arrives.
I have looked at the partedmagic program. I don't understand the flags button. When do I need to use this, especially as it relates to sizing?

I haven't used it since I wrote that tutorial and I can't remember what the flags button is about. I use BING.

Well, I decided to experiment while waiting for the laptop hard drive to arrive. I used parted magic to shrink an 80g desktop hard drive with a single partitiion and no unallocated space. I went down to 36G. I defraged and then made a Ghost recovery point, so that the system would think there was a 36 G hard drive being cloned, and it seemed to think so by the labeling. I then expanded the drive back to 80G and confirmed full functionality. I then attempt to go thru the recovery process as if the 80G drive was recovering the 36G recovery point. My understanding was that this would be seen by G12 as a 36G partition holding 25G of data being expanded to an 80G drive. This should mean that the recovery process would show an expand option rather than it being greyed out. It did not. The expand option was not available. I did not complete the process to see what size would result since this was a simulation, but I am now completely confused as to how or when the expand volume works on G12. The reason this is a problem is I had hoped to shrink my recovery points so I could recover to a smaller drive if needed. Maybe that would still work, but the inability to select expand volume in this case makes me skeptical. Is this a bug, or am I missing something?

rleescott,

I think you have to be restoring to unallocated space for this to work. You were attempting to restore to a partition. For it to work you would have to delete the 80 GB partition before restoring. This simulates restoring to a new blank HD.

If it doesn't work you can simply resize the restored 36 GB partition to 80 GB with Parted Magic.

My test computer came in handy. Using Ghost 12, I restored an image to a large area of Unallocated Space. The "Resize restored drive" box was unticked by default and the MB value was greyed out. When I ticked the "Resize restored drive" box, the MB value became active and you can choose any size you like for the final partition size. Very nice.

Ok, I guess the proof will be when my new, unpartitioned drive arrives and I have the expand option. I will post back when I have the results, and it sound like it will be positive. But, also, you are convinced that my new recovery point created after reducing the 80G partitiion to 36G will be able to be transferred to a new or used drive larger than 36G but smaller than 80G, even if the recovery point was created from an 80G max capacity drive that was shrunk to 36G before the recovery point was created? This particular point is key for anyone who wants to recover to a smaller drive and use the large drive for something else.

Using Ghost 12, the recovery point you have of the 35 GB partition can be restored to a HD smaller than 35 GB. Within reason. It depends on the last sector in use. It can also be restored to a HD larger than 35 GB. 1000 GB if you have one and the final partition size can be anything from "less than" 35 GB to 1000 GB.