Drive Image 2002 & restoring image to a smaller partition

[videobruce]

I have a image of a 8 GB partition that I want to restore to a another 6 GB partition (different HDD's). The actual file is just over 1 GB. The program won't let me do it because of the smaller partition size even though the actual size of the image is much smaller. Is there anyway around this without deleting the destination partition and a new, larger one (and resizing the 2nd partition on that HDD)? These are active partitions BTW.

[Paul Komski]

Try "deleting" the partition first. That is to say try deleting it in the GUI so that it shows as unallocated space before selecting it as the place to restore the partition to. If that "virtual deletion" becomes ungrayed then it should work OK as long as the files on the larger partition would easily fit on the smaller partition. You are not commited to the changes (including the "deletion") until you confirm the whole restore process itself.

If the original was also from an active partition keep the check box for keeping the original partition type (primary/logical) the same. If there is going to be no resulting active partition after restoration it should prompt you to this effect. If by any chance you end up with no active partition and rebooting fails it should be easy enough to reset it with the floppies; I have never had to do this as a result of such a restoration though that doesn't mean to say it cant happen. With partition work anything is possible so follow the axiom of ensuring you are adequately backed up before you begin.

[videobruce]

I'll try that. I just didn't want to;
delete the partition, resize the 2nd partition, create the 1st partition again, restore the image, then resize both partitions to what they were before all of this.

Is/was there something I could of done before I made the image to eliminate all of this?

[Paul Komski]

I've never seen this as a significant problem since DI will delete the partiton before restoring it in any case. It just seems that if the partition to be restored is smaller than the complete backup partition that it keeps such partitions greyed and inaccessible, in the early stages of such procedures.

As long as you are restoring into the same location you can actually just choose to check the box "to restore into the original location(s)". In these cases it will again prompt you that it will delete the current partitions before restoring to them.

I suppose the theoretical problem is that the software can only guess the approximate size of the final restoration - especially when any compression has been involved. And some compression is always involved since only the parameters of (and not the data within) any pagefile would of course be included in a complete partition.

So I don't think there is anything you can or should do differently. I think that such behaviour is by design and can be overcome in the ways already described. If the uncompressed image file was really too large for the space involved one would obviously be stymied.