Cannot Restore Windows Image To New Hard Drive

I placed a bigger than normal SSD in an older asus laptop.

The operating system is windows 7 professional 32 bit sp1

A laptop which i use very little, with a hard drive more expensive than the laptop itself. Well now i need to use said ssd drive to another computer build so i took it out of the laptop and replaced it with a smaller mechanical hard drive.

Initially i tried to just do a system clone using acronis, easus, and another built in software included with the SSD however they all failed to clone the hard drive because i was getting issues with the partitions ( original ssd was 300 gb new hd i put in is 80 gb).

When i installed windows initially in the 300 gb ssd i didn't use the whole drive instead i made a 60 gb partition just for windows. Anyways since the above didn't work i used windows 7 built in system image maker to create a system image. It completed successfully and i saved it to an external hard drive.

This laptop doesn't have a dvd drive so i made a bootable OS on an sd card ( so that i can use the ''repair computer'' option. After i choose repair computer i see the system image i made and try to load it but i get an error every time '' system image restore failed'' error details: the parameter is incorrect ( 0x80070057)

I tried changing the primary drive in the bios and it made no difference, i loaded the image on a usb stick and also on the hard drive itself that it would restore to but that too failed.

I customized this laptop to my preference reinstalling everything along with the settings would take me about 4 hrs( i rather avoid that but not at the expense of spending even more than 4 hours trying to solve this)

Any suggestions?

 

You are using the word clone. If you mean clone then you can only clone a drive to another of the same or larger size, so 300 into 80 won't go. However if you use the same software to create a partition image or system image instead then it should work satisfactorily. I would avoid the Win 7 imaging software.

 

i skipped using any 3rd party software and just created a system image on the 60 gb partition via windows 7 however i cannot restore it because i get the error i noted above

 

I really would advocate using Acronis or Easeus rather than Win 7 backup.

 

I tried to but was having issues, now my only concern is getting the win 7 backup to restore.

It seems i have not yet deleted the original ssd that was in the laptop, but i despise opening this laptop.

Hard drive is underneath the keyboard so i have to pry to the thing open and connect/disconnect these small delicate ribbon cables. Keyboard is also hard to align without damaging the ribbon cables and wire underneath

i really just want advice on how to get the win 7 backup to work

 

This bootable OS you created, is it the exact same version of Win 7 that was used to create the image?

 

yes and i still never got it to work

I managed to restore the image on the mechanical drive though
EaseUS was giving me issues ( older version) but i downloaded the todo free 10.0 version and it solved it
Made a system back up image, and then created both a cd and usb ''emergency disk'' using the tools option so i could restore the image.
Whole process took about 2 hrs


Windows 7 back up image is suppose to be faster and simpler but the 3 times i tried to use it ( including this laptop scenario) i always have issues



Although i hardly use this laptop anymore ( reason i took out its ssd) , i just noticed how much slower a non SSD is. I was getting 12 seconds boot times with the ssd, now with a 5400 rpm mechanical drive i take about 1 minute to boot .

 

If there weren't such capable free alternatives such as Easeus Todo, AOMEI Backupper and, my personal favorite, Mactium Reflect then I would use Win 7 Backup, but compared with the third party offerings it is a poor thing.

Pleased you finally managed to restore your image