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[dminches]

Does that mean that one can never restore an image to a smaller drive than the original one?

I guess I can try a 300 GB drive as my target and see if that works unless that won't worked either since 300 < 320.

Can one perform a backup and restore with Ghost which is not sector based?

[coyote2]

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Brian_K wrote:

Even with 80 GB of data, the data spread might have been greater than 139 GB.

Ghost does sector based restores so if  your original partition was....( * is sectors in use, - is free space)

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then the target partition to restore into can not be smaller than...

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Some apps don't do sector based restores. Probably the one you used.

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Wow, I did not know that I only got lucky when restoring to smaller drives in the past.

Does anyone know of a product which would re-arrange the data on a drive?  I'm using Diskeeper, and I've noticed that it and various other defragers automatically make different decisions in different circumstances about where to spread the data on a partition...but I don't recall ever seeing an option to minimize data spread.

I ask, because dminches could potentially do 4 steps:

1.  Restore to a drive not smaller than the current spread (whatever that is), then

2.  Use some application to minimize the spread, then

3.  Create a new image, and then

4.  Restore the new image to his desired drive (assuming the spread would now be < 139GB).

[Brian_K]

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dminches wrote:

Does that mean that one can never restore an image to a smaller drive than the original one?

 

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The best fix is to resize the source partition to the size of the target partition. (you can resize it back later if desired) Then create your image and restore it to the target partition.

[Brian_K]

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coyote2 wrote:

Does anyone know of a product which would re-arrange the data on a drive?

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Ghost 2003 doesn't do sector based restores (so your neat defragging will be messed up). It does file based restores and squashes all the data to the start of the partition.

[dminches]

How do I resize the source partition?

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Brian_K wrote:

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dminches wrote:

Does that mean that one can never restore an image to a smaller drive than the original one?

 

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The best fix is to resize the source partition to the size of the target partition. (you can resize it back later if desired) Then create your image and restore it to the target partition.

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[Brian_K]

Get a GParted CD.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm

Make sure you use 1 MB alignment (also called 2048 sector)

[dminches]

Thanks,

Frankly, it is pretty weak that Ghost makes you do this.  There should be an option for how you restore the image.

[Brian_K]

This applies to all imaging apps (sector based).

I'm downloading Gparted 12.1.1 now. (stable release)

[Brian_K]

I just used it to resize (smaller) one of my Win7 partitions. It worked well. The 1 MB alignment was the default.

[redk9258]

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Brian_K wrote:

Ghost 2003 doesn't do sector based restores (so your neat defragging will be messed up). It does file based restores and squashes all the data to the start of the partition.

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I didn't know that. I thought it was also sector based.