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.

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?

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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


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?

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.
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. Is this correct?
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?

Hope this helps clarify the issues.