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I built a media PC years ago with three 750 GB drives in a Raid-5 configuration. This allowed for 1.5 TB of space and had redundancy. At the time I didn't know how bad performance was with RAID. I wanted to break the RAID and instead simply use a hard drive. Here are my steps:

  1. Add 2 TB hard drive
  2. Boot into Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on the RAID.
  3. Run the Backup utility and backup my drives to the 2 TB drive.
  4. Unplug two of the RAID drives.
  5. In BIOS, break the RAID.
  6. Boot off a Windows DVD and from 'Repair', go to a command prompt.
  7. Use DISKPART to CLEAN the single 750 GB drive, and create a partition on it.
  8. Copy the backup from the 2 TB drive to the 750 GB drive (it's about 370 GB in size).
  9. Clean the 2 TB drive.
  10. Select 'Restore' from the Windows DVD boot option.
  11. Restore the image off the single 750 GB drive to be on the 2 TB drive.

Step 11 tells me that my partition is too small. I call BS on this. Yes, it's smaller than the combined 2.25 TB of hard drives but this was in a RAID configuration and it is FAR larger than the 1.5 space I had. This was not a software RAID in Windows; it was created in my motherboard's BIOS menu.

Can anyone please help me? I need to restore this image somehow.

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  • possible duplicate of Windows 7 Image Restore with a smaller hard drive You should have shrunk the partition before imaging. Your only option now is 3rd party solutions.
    – Tetsujin
    Feb 2, 2015 at 18:05
  • I could not have shrunk the partition because there was no single partition. It was RAID. And what 3rd party utility are you referring to? Also, that isn't a duplicate.
    – Paul
    Feb 2, 2015 at 18:22
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    The fact it was RAID has nothing to do with your partition sizing. Did you read the dupe link?
    – Tetsujin
    Feb 2, 2015 at 18:25
  • Absolutely. Did you read my OP? The link has someone downsizing their drive. I am not. I'm going from a 1.5 TB partition to a 2 TB partition.
    – Paul
    Feb 2, 2015 at 19:39

1 Answer 1

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I'm going to guess this is a bug in how Windows restore handles drive size checking. My previous RAID-5 array had 2.25 TB of storage however due to redundancy, the actual partition was 1.5 TB. The new drive was 2.0 TB and should have been a valid destination. I restored my RAID array and shronk the volume from 1.5 TB to be 1.1 TB. Created another backup, wiped the RAID array, moved the backup to a drive from the RAID array and restored to the 2.0 TB drive. Pain in the you-know-what, but it got the job done.

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