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    I backed up my comuter to WHS. The drive was 250GB but only had 40GB of data.

    I removed my old drive and installed an 80GB flash drive. I then booted from the WHS restore CD to do a retore. When I get to the section where I pikc the drives, it won't let me continue. Even though my original drive had only 40GB of data, the selector shows it as 250GB and has a red "=X=" and I can't get it to restore to my newer, smaller drive.

    Is there any way around this? Do restores only have to be done to drives of equal or larger physical size regardless of the amount of data on the drive?
    Monday, November 30, 2009 3:04 AM

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    The safe rule of thumb is that you need a drive at least as large as the original. A restore can sometimes be done to a somewhat smaller drive (occasionally as small as somewhat greater than 50% the size). Going from a 250 GB drive to an 80 GB drive is not going to work, though.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Monday, November 30, 2009 4:11 AM
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    The only way around would be to resize the volume on the original disk to the intended new volume size or a bit smaller (using 3rd party tools, since diskpart is not able to truncate disk space before the last location of a file), reboot and perform another backup.
    This should make a restore to that smaller drive possible.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Monday, November 30, 2009 10:02 AM
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  • Question
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    The safe rule of thumb is that you need a drive at least as large as the original. A restore can sometimes be done to a somewhat smaller drive (occasionally as small as somewhat greater than 50% the size). Going from a 250 GB drive to an 80 GB drive is not going to work, though.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Monday, November 30, 2009 4:11 AM
    Moderator
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    The only way around would be to resize the volume on the original disk to the intended new volume size or a bit smaller (using 3rd party tools, since diskpart is not able to truncate disk space before the last location of a file), reboot and perform another backup.
    This should make a restore to that smaller drive possible.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Monday, November 30, 2009 10:02 AM
    Moderator
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    I know that it is 2 years after the fact, but thanks for the info on this subject. I was attempting to use a 500gb drive to restore from my 750gb drive and was running into many problems. Once I read your posts I went into the old drive (750GB) and performed the volume shrinkage (WIN7Pro64bit) and was able to get the volume down to 374GB. Even though there was only 60GB of data and OS on the drive it could only shrink to 374GB, if I knew which piece of S/W was reserving space so far out on the drive I could remove it to shrink further, but not sure how to do such. But all is well now and I can use the larger drive on my WHS 2011 build. Thanks again !!
    Tuesday, January 10, 2012 3:00 AM