Restore Windows Image Help

Software & Operating Systems Windows
1

I made an image of a Windows computer using the built in Windows "Create System Image" backup functionality, in Windows 7. Now I am attempting to restore that image. I am receiving an error message:

Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original system disk. Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation. (0x80042407)

The Image is ~100GB. The new drive is 500GB. And yet, it is too small?

The old drive, that the image was pulled from may have been >500GB. I think the problem is that the old drive Image is trying to create partitions bigger than will fit on the new drive.

Currently I'm on the way to the store to buy a 1TB drive. I hope it works.

Please note, I tried to manually restore the image using WBADMIN but it could not find the backup, even though Windows Recovery can find the backup just fine. When WBADMIN attempts to find the image, it always fails. So I cannot use the procedure outlined here:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/f15bfe2f-e265-479a-afa3-f055530c97f5/windows-server-backup-0x80042407-seriously

Also, I realize that creating a new recovery image with a smaller size, or changing the partition size that would go into the recovery image, may resolve my issue, but that's not feasible at this exact moment either. Hence, I'm buying a bigger drive. My biggest fear at this point is that the same error message will occur with the larger drive.

2

if you install both drives in the computer and use something like dd to copy drive A to drive B then use gparted to expand the partition. that should work and keep all of mbr stuff too

3

OK, so a 1TB Drive allowed me to reimage. Just a heads up for anybody using windows image from one drive to another - even if the drives are the same size, make sure your image is smaller than the available space on the new drive!