Bare Metal Restore

I got 2 new SSD drives this week at work for my laptop. They are replacing 2 regular drives of the same size. Unfortunately the old drives were setup in a RAID 0 configuration so to the OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) they read as a single 320 GB drive. I had less than half the space used up so I thought I could do a Bare Metal Restore backup and restore it to one of the new drives. The backup went fine but when I went to restore I kept getting the error:  "The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found."  Not a very helpful message, it gave some additional information about checking for excluded disks and some suggestions if you were restoring to a USB disk none of which applied.

I assumed the problem had to do with the RAID configuration or something with the size of the backup. After some research it turned out that you can not do a Bare Metal Restore from a larger disk to a smaller one even if the size of the data to restore would fit on the new disk. So now I had to figure out how to manage that. I went to Server Manager and tried to Shrink the C Drive but due to fragmentation of the drive it could not shrink it enough. I ran disk defragmenter and tried to shrink the drive again but it still would not shrink it enough. Then I remembered a tool I had used when converting my home laptop from a windows machine to dual booting windows and linux, Perfect Disk. It had been able to move files that the windows defragmenter couldn't so I gave it a try and sure enough, it came to the rescue again and completely defragmented the drive and I was able to shrink it enough, do another backup and restore it to  one of the new drives and everything is working great with the new SSDs.

-Z