By trade and education I am a computer professional but I haven't worked with backup utilities very much. I used ghost a few times back about 10 years ago and haven't really had to since.

I am now face with an interesting predicament. About 4 months ago I got a new PC from a company that included a 450 gig hard drive and a 30 gig Solid State drive. Guess which drive they put the OS on? One clue... its starting to run low on space due to updates and such.

I am running Vista 64 Home Edition and I found out about the utility to let you shrink the HD on the fly. So I split the big drive into two. It kept all the other stuff in tact and I now have 2 225ish gig partitions one empty and one with most of my stuff on it as well as the solid state with Vista on it. What I want to do is get Vista onto the empty partition which i will dub W: and make it the primary boot drive without a bunch of fuss. I would rather not re-format and whatnot if I can avoid it. So in the words of the nearly immortal Scooby Doo.... REEEEEELPPP!!!

Sparky,

A brief answer. Ask for more details if needed. What software do you plan to use?

Delete the partition dubbed W: You want unallocated space here so Vista doesn't see a partition when the image is created.

Create an image of the Vista partition, writing the image to the remaining partition on the large HD.

Remove the 30 GB HD from your computer. Configure the 450 GB HD as the boot drive.

Boot from the restore CD and restore your image to the unallocated space.

Boot into Vista.

Okay Im not sure which software to use at this point and thanks for pointing out to delete the partition. I would probably have caught that or at least should have from having formatted so many hard drives in my tenure. I was thinking of using some sort of bootable CD with either DriveImage XML or something. I can't get the darn thing to even think of working in Vista on the fly. It just doesn't want to lock the drive or VSS. I may have to use the Ultimate Boot CD though because I only have one copy of xp which happens to be a Dell Restore. I am sure there are alot of routes I could choose at this point but wading through all of this is a tad daunting though I don't mind putting the work in at all.

PS: What kind of software combo would you recommend?

Sparky,

You can use IFD (Image for DOS) as a one month trial. It's one of my favourites.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-dos.htm

Download and double click makedisk.exe to create a boot CD. Don't tick any of the Select Options. Ignore the Additional IFD.INI Options.

Using the CD is fairly straight forward. In general, use the BIOS (Direct) choice instead of BIOS. It's faster.

Any questions?

I forgot to mention, when you restore, you can tell IFD what size Vista partition you would like. It's on the final window. You can choose anything from 30 to 225 GB.

Okay I got the backup made and I am ready to restore it. The problem is now the it wants to delete everything on the secondary hard drive ie) the 450 gig one or at least the screen it runs into says that they will be deleted and I don't want that either.

I see why now.... hrrm.... I dont have any media large enough to store the large files on to house them to do a backup/restore without wiping out a hard drive at least not using this anyway. I do thank you for all of your help Brian :) It is very much appreciated. I guess I have to find something that i can write onto a partition of a hard drive without killing the other partitions if that is even possible.

Sparky,

Stand by. You have made a mistake somewhere. Your image should be around 20 GB which should easily fit on the 225 GB partition. It will be restored to unallocated space so there is no problem there. Where have you gone wrong?

Sparky wrote on Mar 21^st, 2009 at 5:33pm:

The problem is now the it wants to delete everything on the secondary hard drive ie) the 450 gig one or at least the screen it runs into says that they will be deleted and I don't want that either.

Are you restoring to the 225 GB of unallocated space? None of your files will be deleted. You must be choosing the wrong partition.

I just ran through a practice restore and you don't get a message about deleting files or partitions if you restore to unallocated space. So you are not restoring to the correct area.

Okay here is a step by step of what I am doing:

I boot into IFD and start the restore process.
I pick the location of the file which is on a partition of the drive I want to restore to. I pick the options of BIOS Direct and then I get to the screen where it says that the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted. I hit next at that screen and I get a message saying that the image file is on the disk I will be writing to are you sure you want to do this and I stop there because I am not wanting to screw anything up.

OK. I thought you had a 450 GB HD divided into two partitions. One partition contained all your data. The other partition was empty and was to be deleted so you should only have one partition on that HD.


Quote:

the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted.

That's one thing I don't understand. You should only have one partition (225 GB) and 225 GB of "Free Space". Not two partitions.

I think I may know what I did. Instead of backing up just the partition in question I backed up the entire drive. That may be what is causing my issues. While I am back on here though. One thing I am not sure how to work around at this point is when I do manage to get this thing backed up and restored, since the restore will be be the OS and such how will that effect the drive letters and whatnot? Considering all of the registry references to C: etc

Brian wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2009 at 12:43am:

OK. I thought you had a 450 GB HD divided into two partitions. One partition contained all your data. The other partition was empty and was to be deleted so you should only have one partition on that HD. Quote: the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted. That's one thing I don't understand. You should only have one partition (225 GB) and 225 GB of "Free Space". Not two partitions.

Okay I can explain that. I have one solid state drive C: which is 30 gig and where the goofs that built my system decided it best to put the OS. Then I have a 450 gig hard drive F: which I used Vista to shrink into two halves. F: and W: I then split W: into a 100 gig and 132gig portion. The 100 gig I formatted and assigned a drive letter. I left the 132 gigs where I want to restore the backup I did of C: unallocated. The backup is stored on F:

So it looks like this:

Backup C: ----- stored on F: which needs to go to unallocated on the same drive different partition that F: is

Easy. Don't worry about drive letters. Your restored Vista will be C: drive. When you restore, the SSD will not be in the computer and on the first boot from the 450 GB HD the new Vista will become C: drive. The SSD can be installed later but that drive will no longer be C: drive.

When you backup, you only need to backup the Vista partition on the SSD. So the size of the image will be around 20 GB. If you backed up the wrong partition, delete the backup.

Have you deleted the empty partition on the 450 GB HD? Was the empty partition first or second on that HD?

I just read your last post. It's clear now.

I backed up the right partition but I used the entire drive option. And the empty partition on the 450 Gig drive is just showing up in vista's drive management as unallocated 132.82GB and it is the third partition listed. F: is the first for the drive, then W: then the unallocated portion.

I never use the entire drive option. In IFD, will it let you restore the Vista partition instead of the whole HD? I think it should but if not you should re-image the Vista partition.

On the final screen of the IFD restore I suggest choosing...

Set Active
Validate Byte-for-Byte
Restore First Track (Auto)
and nothing else apart from the Max Resize option otherwise you will get a 30 GB partition.

Restoring to the third "space" on the HD should be no problem. Vista should boot as IFD will correct for the starting sector offset.

If you do get a boot error suggesting a BCD issue, boot from a Vista DVD and follow instructions for a BCD edit.

I've just been playing with an entire drive image/restore and everything you have reported makes sense. As you have probably discovered, you can restore a single partition from the entire drive image.

Got the image made and I am ready to rock. Getting ready to validate and restore the darn thing :)

Okay I got it done :) Everything seems to be in working order. Now what do do with the solid state drive..... hrrmmm

Excellent! I'm pleased it worked first go.

Now you can reinstall your SSD, delete the partition and do what you like. It's up to you. Maybe a backup drive for Vista images?? Seems a shame.