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!!!

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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:

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.

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


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