Bare Metal Restore to a smaller hard drive

[Rensul 1]

I've decided not go with an SSD when I add the 5th drive to my Gen8 - I don't like the idea of moving immovable things...  Instead, I bought a WD Red 750GB 2.5" drive that I'll use on the Schoondoggie bracket.

[diehard 42]

Good choice.

[jmwills 284]

The BMR recovery solution provided with WHS absolutely will let you recover to a smaller drive, with a caveat.  I recently bought a Lenovo ideapad which came with a 500 gb spinning drive and I wanted to replace that with an SSD drive.  My drive had three partitions;  System Reserved - OS -Data   (300MB 85 gigs & balance)

 

I formatted the SSD to have a 300 MB partition, 85 gig partition and the balance went to the the D drive, some 40 gigs or so.  The first two matched up perfectly and the third had too much data from the source to the destination so the GUI denied a restore.  I didn't care because all of the data was on the server too.

 

I restored the SR and OS partitions and then copied what data I wanted to keep.  The whole process took about 20 minutes, and, was done from a third party machine.  I exchanged the drives and off I went.

[Drashna Jaelre 159]

I cheat. If I know I'm going to be "converting" to a SSD, I shrink the partitoins to fit, run a backup afterwards, and the restore that new partition size. Works fabulously.

[ikon 439]

I cheat. If I know I'm going to be "converting" to a SSD, I shrink the partitoins to fit, run a backup afterwards, and the restore that new partition size. Works fabulously.

 

That's what I did for mine.

 

 

The BMR recovery solution provided with WHS absolutely will let you recover to a smaller drive, with a caveat.  I recently bought a Lenovo ideapad which came with a 500 gb spinning drive and I wanted to replace that with an SSD drive.  My drive had three partitions;  System Reserved - OS -Data   (300MB 85 gigs & balance)

 

I formatted the SSD to have a 300 MB partition, 85 gig partition and the balance went to the the D drive, some 40 gigs or so.  The first two matched up perfectly and the third had too much data from the source to the destination so the GUI denied a restore.  I didn't care because all of the data was on the server too.

 

I restored the SR and OS partitions and then copied what data I wanted to keep.  The whole process took about 20 minutes, and, was done from a third party machine.  I exchanged the drives and off I went.

 

Thanks. Good to know.

[Rensul 1]

Drashna - Shrinking the volume does work fabulously but the problem I was having is that Windows doesn't shrink it down to size enough since it encounters these immovable files - which yes - you can use 3rd party tools to move them but I felt that was too risky.

jmwills - Really like your solution - unfortunately I've already purchased the drive (and in the end saved some money but sacrificed some performance...) Thanks for the input.

[Drashna Jaelre 159]

Or you could use "defrag c: /x /h", which is Windows' built in defragmentation tool. /x does free space consolidation, and /h runs it at a higher priority.

[dataoscar 0]

Or you could use "defrag c: /x /h", which is Windows' built in defragmentation tool. /x does free space consolidation, and /h runs it at a higher priority.

Make sure not to backup the server after you do the defrag. WHS will think that you changed your entire drive and it will try to back up all the changes.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[Drashna Jaelre 159]

Make sure not to backup the server after you do the defrag. WHS will think that you changed your entire drive and it will try to back up all the changes.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

Maybe not the entire drive. Depending on it's layout.

Also, using a 3rd party utility to shrink the partition will do the same thing, actually. It's moving the data's location around to shrink the partition, as well.

 

That.... and after resizing the partition with a 3rd party tool may change the disk's ID, causing you to need to reconfigure backups for the client as well.

[revengineer 20]

Just a quick report that I just tried the procedure to shrink the partition, backup, swap hdd for ssd, restore Os on ssd. This did not work for me. It failed at the backup part, where the server simply crashes and reboots. Apparently the server backup was not happy with the new partition size, which I only reduced by 1 GB.

 

Fortunately I could work around the above issue. The ssd I purchased had only a few MB less storage than the HDD, both were reported 500 GB drives. I attempted the restore of the previous backup with unchanged partition sizes and this succeeded. So I lucked out.