System image/restore (free or low cost)

[tcsenter]

I've used Macrium Free before but it will not restore to dissimilar hard disks unless you purchase the Professional or Advanced, with is like $60. I want the ability to restore to different hard disk. Anyone know of such a utility? I also don't mind paying like $20, but $60 is more than Acronis True Image. TIA

 

[HOSED]

http://www.geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-drive/
Disclaimer I have not tried this, but have successfully used clonezilla to reimage an existing drive.
There is also a suggestion in the comments that involves magic ISO

 

[stinger608]

Macrium Reflect will restore to dissimilar hard drives without issues. I just did a image from a 320 gig mechanical hard drive and restored said image to a 256 gig SSD.

It will not, however, do the "dissimilar hardware" restore in the free version. Which all that is, is deleting the drivers and such. You can do that through sysprep in win 7, 8, and 8.1.

 

[tcsenter]

Srsly? Well that might change everything. A few years ago, I tried to restore to a different hard disk (with the version current at the time) and it refused to work.

Are you sure? I guess I could test it myself and find out.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'm sure. The free version of Macrium restores to dissimilar disks.

At least some, maybe all, of the paid versions will restore to dissimilar hardware generally--new motherboards, etc.

I'm not sure how well that feature actually works. Paragon Adaptive Restore will also restore to dissimilar hardware. I don't think it's free.

 

[Bubbaleone]

I'll have to disagree with stinger608; Several (certainly not all) free disk/partion editors are capable of proportionately re-sizing a volume, to fit a smaller capacity drive, so long as the existing data on the larger drive (minus all free and/or unallocated space) doesn't exceed the capacity of the smaller drive, which has nothing to do with restoring to dissimilar hardware.

Disk editing software that can perform restoration to dissimilar hardware includes the capability to produce a WinPE or Linux bootable image to which one can add all the drivers required by the "dissimilar" machine. Once booted into WinPE (or Linux) you then select the image to restore. The editor then "restores" that image to the "dissimilar" machine while simultaneously installing the drivers that were previously added to the bootable media. Be ready to shell out some bucks.

Before you decide that Sysprep (which is intended for production deployment scenarios) is how you want to go, take a look at this TechNet article: What is Sysprep?. MS clearly states "You must not use Sysprep to reconfigure an existing installation of Windows that has already been deployed. Use Sysprep only to configure new installations of Windows." I found out the hard way that sysprepping an existing (old) windows installation, using the sysprep /generalize command, can lead to some very undesirable results because sysprep is not just "....deleting the drivers and such".

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[Towermax]

I've used Macrium Reflect Free to restore to all kinds and sizes of disks--no problems of any kind. It's my main tool for moving hard drives to SSDs, and occasionally, the reverse.

 

[Bubbaleone]

It appears that there's a great deal of misunderstanding going on in this thread as what the term "restore to dissimilar hardware" means when discussing disk editing software capability. Cloning an image from a larger HDD/SSD to a smaller HDD/SSD (or vice versa) is not...repeat...is not restoring to dissimilar hardware. This particular procedure simply combines two of the basic disk editing operations; partition resizing and cloning. Partition resizing is not restoring to dissimilar hardware, and cloning is not restoring to dissimilar hardware.


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[tcsenter]

Yeah I'm not referring to cloning disk to disk. I mean restoring or recovery from a backup (complete) disk image (stored on whatever media is supported), because the hard disk has failed and needed replacing (where I'm assuming the replacement drive well may be a different make, model, and size hard disk). I'm not concerned about restoring to dissimilar chipsets and SATA controllers. That would be nice but I'd just accepted that will require a clean install of OS and applications rather than restore from backup.

 

[Bubbaleone]

If you need to clone an image of a healthy Windows installation because the drive's ready to die, and the cloned drive is going right back in the same computer you cloned it from, you don't need to worry about the make, model, or size (unless you're going smaller) of the new drive. Thanks to the ATA specification that all drive manufacturers adhere to, storage is storage. Of all the free disk editors I've used, I found EaseUS Todo Backup Free to be quite capable and intuitive to use. If you prefer, Todo will also perform backup that can later be restored as well.

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[Bubbaleone]

Yeah I'm not referring to cloning disk to disk. I mean restoring or recovery from a backup (complete) disk image (stored on whatever media is supported), because the hard disk has failed and needed replacing (where I'm assuming the replacement drive well may be a different make, model, and size hard disk). I'm not concerned about restoring to dissimilar chipsets and SATA controllers. That would be nice but I'd just accepted that will require a clean install of OS and applications rather than restore from backup.

I just re-read your reply. Are you saying you've already made a backup image that you planned to restore to the new replacement drive?

 

[tcsenter]

I just re-read your reply. Are you saying you've already made a backup image that you planned to restore to the new replacement drive?

Not yet. It's for a PC that I'm giving as X-mas gift to a family member. I replaced the OEM HDD with SSD. Instead of just cloning the HDD (OEM disk image) to the SSD, I clean installed the OS, latest drivers, and some basic apps/plugins. But this eliminated the OEM restore/recovery partition scheme the PC came with, so I'd like to supply them with an alternative solution based on a system/disk image that I've created.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Then I think it may benefit you to check-out the following artilce on using Aomei Onekey Recovery. I'll rank Aoemi's disk utilities as comparable to EaseUS in quality: How to create a factory restore partition in Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1.

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[RossMAN]

Then I think it may benefit you to check-out the following artilce on using Aomei Onekey Recovery. I'll rank Aoemi's disk utilities as comparable to EaseUS in quality: How to create a factory restore partition in Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1.

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Thanks for the link.

 

[tcsenter]

Then I think it may benefit you to check-out the following artilce on using Aomei Onekey Recovery. I'll rank Aoemi's disk utilities as comparable to EaseUS in quality:

I meant an alternative to the hidden partition scheme located on a system HDD, where it is prone to loss if the disk goes bad. The main drawback of Aomei OneKey utility (for me) is that it requires the bootable environment to be stored/located on the system drive. It's a great solution when the system needs to be recovered due to software issue only. e.g. a virus compromises the Windows installation. But if the drive is unhealthy enough to need replacing, or just up and dies with little warning (as drives do sometimes), that's a problem when your boot/recovery environment is on that disk. I'm looking for a solution suitable for both scenarios: software compromise and system drive failure/replacement.

I intend to use 16GB USB3.0 flash drive as the backup/restore device. It would be nice to make it bootable and contain everything as well; boot environment, the restore utility, and backup/image data, but that's probably wishful thinking. I will accept having to boot into the recovery environment/utility using one medium, such as CD, which then allows restore/access to another medium where the backup image is located, such as USB flash drive.

Macrium (free) will pretty much do what I want, except that I'm reasonable sure I tried to do this a couple/few years ago, and when I tested restoring to a different make, model, and capacity HDD, it balked with an error message about the source and destination drives were not the same. I then went to the Macrium website and noticed the feature chart, showing that 'restore to dissimilar hardware' was a paid-for feature only. I presumed/inferred this to include the hard disks. Maybe that was wrong and the real problem was of some other nature.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Understood...You said, "I will accept having to boot into the recovery environment/utility using one medium, such as CD, which then allows restore/access to another medium where the backup image is located, such as USB flash drive." If that's the case, I believe you'll find the freeware AOMEI Backupper Standard For Win7 will do everything you need. I'm recommending it because its capable of creating a bootable WinPE image without having to install the WAIK, which is a feature typically reserved for retail disk editors. But, you decide....

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