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Windows 7 – moving to an SSD

November 24, 2009 by Wayne Small 12 Comments

My HP MiniNote 2140 which I got from TechEd Australia is actually a pretty impressive little machine.  My only concern is that given I am using it so much, I wanted to replace the 160G SATA Hard Drive with an SSD drive. I figured this would be better for me as it reduces the chances of a head crash given I carry it everywhere whilst it’s still running.

I used the Windows 7 Backup  program to do a complete backup of the hard drive to an external USB drive.  I replaced the 160GB SATA drive with a 120GB SSD drive and booted from a USB DVD drive with the Windows 7 DVD in it.  I selected the Repair Computer option and then started to restore from the USB hard drive until I got this error below

"No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found. Try the following: […] (0x80042412)"

Basically it says that it can not find a disk to recover to.  Investigation showed that the issue was not quite what it seemed.  Windows Image backup from Vista, or Windows 7 will not allow you to restore to a smaller hard drive. In my case I was going from a 160GB SATA drive to a 120GB SSD drive.  Other people had used third party imaging tools to do the job. I decided to try something different.

I reasoned that if the issue was that the image was too large (being a 160GB image) that if I used Windows 7 to Shrink the partition, it might work.  I used the disk management console to Shrink the partition of Windows 7 from 160GB down to 85GB.  I then performed another image backup with the Windows 7 backup tool to USB hard drive.

This time when I attempted to restore it, it went through just fine. After the restore, I used the Windows 7 Disk Management tool to expand the size of the partition back up to the maximum on this disk of 120GB.  Hopefully this will help others that might face the same issues in future.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Backup, Disaster Recovery, Restore, Windows 7

About The Author

Wayne has been working with Microsoft Server products in the SMB market for over 20 years. He has a passion for technology and been a Microsoft MVP for over 15 years. Read More…

Comments

  1. luke says

    January 23, 2010 at 11:33 pm

    Had the same problem, this article helped me solve it. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. Stephen says

    March 16, 2010 at 11:37 am

    This was an excellent post. Saved me a ton of time!

    Reply
    • Wayne Small says

      March 25, 2010 at 6:27 am

      Glad to have helped Stephen

      Reply
  3. Kevin says

    June 4, 2010 at 1:47 pm

    Yours was the first post I came to when trying to do the swap to a smaller ssd. I gotta say, this sort of thing is never this easy…thanks very much for your post.
    Best

    Reply
  4. Michel says

    August 13, 2010 at 6:23 pm

    same issue, same solution! Perfect!

    Reply
  5. Norm says

    October 6, 2011 at 11:22 am

    Outstanding artical! Glad I found this. I was trying to move from a 250GB HD to a 128GM SSD

    Thanks

    Reply
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