W10 macrium mirror to be restored on a smaller drive

ineuw · 07 Nov 2017

My Windows 10 Acer V5 laptop has a ~430GB drive (excluding the system and W10 recovery partition), and I am creating a Macrium mirror copy and saving on a borrowed external drive temporarily. My plan is to subdivide the drive with Minitool as

150 system partition
150 for My documents & other data
100+ macrium backups

Of the 430GB, the system programs and data occupy 63GB. Can I restore the original mirror to a reduced size partition and will it boot?

topgundcp · 07 Nov 2017

Post a screen shot of disk management then i'll show you how to do it without using minitool, just with Macrium.
Screenshot - Take in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

ArnoldLayne · 07 Nov 2017

Back-ups should be on a different drive and not another partition of the same drive you are making back-ups of. If the HDD fails how do you plan to access the back-ups if they are on the same drive?

ineuw · 07 Nov 2017

W10 macrium mirror to be restored on a smaller drive-disk-management.jpg

Here is the disk layout image. I hope that this is what was wanted.

ineuw · 07 Nov 2017

ArnoldLayne, it helps if you would have read the posts from the beginning. The macrium backup is currently residing on an external drive not shown because I disconnected it.

ArnoldLayne · 07 Nov 2017

ineuw said:

ArnoldLayne, it helps if you would have read the posts from the beginning. The macrium backup is currently residing on an external drive not shown because I disconnected it.

You stated you want to partition the main drive as such:

150 system partition
150 for My documents & other data
100+ macrium backups

I made the assumption this is the internal hard drive of the laptop.

ineuw · 07 Nov 2017

Yes, that's correct. Separate partitions are not affected if the OS crashes on its own partition, even if it is the same disk drive. I use this setup on my desktop and I did many restores using the Macrium Live USB, but the C: drive to be restored was always the same. If you ever used Windows 7 mirror backup, that mirror can only be restored to the same or a larger size drive. In any case, Microsoft pulled that backup software.

My question is, that if my mirror of a 430 GB disk, of which only 63 GB is used, will the restore work to a 150gb partition.

topgundcp · 08 Nov 2017

I assume that you've already created a Rescue Disk. Boot up with it.
Click on restore tab and browse for the backup image on the external HD.
Select your current Windows drive as destiunation drive.
Click on each partition of the destination drive, then click "Delete Existing Partition" until empty as shown:
Next click on first partition (400MB) drag and drop to the destination, do the same for 300MB.
NOTE: You might have an extra MSR partition which was not shown with disk management. If so, do the same as for 400MB and 300MB.
Now, drag and drop C drive from source then click on "Restored Partition Properties" as shown. Enter New partiiton size. In your case, would be 150GB.
Drag and drop next partition and repeat step 6, enter 150GB.
Drag and Drop the last partition then click on Maximum size so it would take the rest.
Final layout should look like this: 400MB, 300MB, 150GB Cdrive, 150GB, ~130G
Click OK ->Next->Finish
Once done, just to make sure it will boot. Click on "Fix Windows Boot Problems" and follow the screen.
Reboot.

NOTE: The screens above are from my disk and shown as an example.

ineuw · 08 Nov 2017

topgundcp many many thanks for your labors. Your instructions are perfectly clear and my disk partition scheme is identical to yours. Just now, also came across a Macrium forum post with the same issue and the responses indicated that Macrium will readjust itself to the smaller C: partition. Thanks again.

RolandJS · 08 Nov 2017

"...macrium backup is currently residing on an external drive..."
and
"150 system partition
150 for My documents & other data
100+ macrium backups"
A quick reading of the above, would have led to my assuming that future backups will be stored on the same physical hard-drive, along with the OS and Data partitions.
Overall thread read -- MR backups will remain on the external hard-drive, did I understand that correctly?