Restore Windows 7 System image to a new disk.

My experience trying to transfer my windows 7 system partition from a 500GB partition on a RAID 1 mirror to a 460GB partition on a SSD RAID 0 stripe using windows 7 built in image backup.

Currently my OS, Windows 7 X64, is on a pair of 1TB Hard Disks (HDD) in a RAID 1 mirror with 2 partitions, D Data and C OS. My system is seeming slow and when I check performance monitor I see that most of it is due to disk activity. So I have decided to upgrade to a pair of Solid State Disks (SSD) for the OS and a third SSD for swap (virtual memory).


Now my OS partition is 500GB but the SSD's are only 240 or 480 when RAID 0 stripped. After formating they are 461. This means that my OS partition will need to be shrunk smaller than 461 in order to fit. After a couple of defrags and cleanup I was able to reduce the C drive to 440GB. That should work but it hasn't so far. The problem with windows image backup and restore is that it counts any other partitions on the drive that shares the OS against you. So even though 440 is smaller than 461 it still wont image because I have the 500GB data partition on that same disk. So to use windows image backup and restore I need to backup the data partition and delete it so that only the 440GB partition remains. Then I should be able to boot from the windows 7 x64 CD and do an image recovery from the backup of C to the SSD volume.  I will add another SATA disk to the system to restore the data drive to.


Alternatives might be to use a third party cloning software that wont make me delete the data partition. Also to note when imaging from an HDD to a SSD the partitions must be aligned. normally this happens during windows install but since we are doing a transplant it must be done.  Here is a good article with partition alignment and alternative cloning software.  /http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/