Macrium Reflect V6

[shankle]

                10-14-2016
               Macrium Reflect

Equipment: 2 ssd drives, Windows 7 pro 64-bit, UEFI, Macrium reflect V6, external HD 1t

Have been using Clonezilla for years. The ssd in the computer
is 126G. This causes Clonezilla to fail on a restore. Clonezilla will
not backup from a large drive to a smaller drive. Therefor I have
dropped Clonezilla. One thing I liked about Clonezilla was the ease
with which you could verify the backup.

I have the free version of Macrium reflect. Being new to MF, I have not
been able to find out how to verify the image I just created.
I did make a recovery cd. I have not used it yet and have no idea
if it will work. The only drives I have on this computer are 2 126G SSDs.
I understand it is very important to do a test restore to make sure things
work. I have not done this!
My plan for a restore from MF:
Backup what I have on the 2nd ssd. Delete everything on the 2nd ssd.
Disconnect the 1st ssd which has windows 7 pro 64-bit on it.
Connect my 1T HD with the latest MF Image. Use the recovery cd and see if
I can restore the image to the 2nd ssd.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
            

[mineiro]

I can suggest a live bootup linux distro, it can recognizes ntfs/fat32 partitions. You can try at command line a MD5 or another hash function on file disk image. It can repartition ntfs partitions too using graphical user interface.
On windows side you can try "Norton Ghost", don't have these problems about different disk space. But it's a paid program.

So, you can create a partition with same size of old disk image, use MF or Clonezilla to record disk image and on linux resize that partition. For security backup reasons, defrag original disk before create image disk. Linux distros can fail at this point while resizing disk if don't have unused disk space.
You can create a virtual machine too and do tests on a safe mode on windows or linux.
If its your first time on linux try "kubuntu" distro, it's a more easy distro. Have a good cd-dvd disk burner. You don't need install linux distro, just use it from live cd-rom bootup.

[shankle]

Thank you Mineiro for taking you time to reply.
Since I wasn't getting any response on this in the Masm32 forum
I posted it on the seven forum. The response I got said that
Macrium Reflect will restore from a 1T hd to a 126g ssd.
So that's what I am going to try.

[mineiro]

at orders sir shankle.
Good luck.

[GuruSR]

Windows backups use the VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) while running, unless you use a bootable media to backup the machine with (some SSDs came with Acronis CD's, you *could* do it with that for free).

In order to backup/restore to a smaller drive (which I did yesterday and last week and, well, so on, since most manufacturers give stupid sized drives for the masses who never use it)...

1.)  Boot to an alternate drive, defrag your original boot drive.
2.)  Boot to Windows, Shrink the volume (Disk Management, right click on "My Computer" or "This PC" and select Manage).
3.)  Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you get it tight enough to put on a smaller drive.
4.)  Expand the volume (Disk Management) and put it back to what it was.
5.)  The partitions/drive is now small enough to go onto a smaller drive as the non-movable files are squished together.

GuruSR.