Maximum PC

I just baught a new HP Pavilion - and a new SSD drive to run the rig.
I created my restore disks and installed my new SSD drive to do a recovery on the new drive

Recovery comes up and states the drive is smaller than the one I was shipped.
The one I was shipped was a 1 terabyte drive.
The SSD drive was a 60 gig drive.

I even tried to use a new sata 500 mb drive and it would not let me recover the pc- same limitations.

I called HP was transferred 3 times in about 3 hours of troubleshooting to finally be told there is nothing they can do.
You must use another terabyte drive or bigger.

This is strictly a software check - and is only a limitation on they have put on the restore process.
Putting limitations on hardware upgrades to their pc's should be illegal

So if your looking to customize a new HP Pavilion with SSD - you are out of luck

it should be as simple as borrowing a disk from someone, using it to do a direct install and using your key to register, all of the drivers can be downloaded from hp directly. or do a full backup from the original drive and restoring it to the ssd.

Yeah... you just can't go and do a system recovery on various sized disk (specially from a TB to 60gb), even if you weren't on an HP... its a software limitation due to your partition size. Most oem recovery software is basically dumb and meant for that system; don't blame HP for this, they are not hardware liming your abilities. You just have to know the limitations of your system and adapt.

That being said, you have two options, buy a 3rd party disk imaging tool (such as ShadowProtect Desktop or Norton Ghost, lots of others out there too) or do a fresh install.


Even with ShadowProtect, you can't restore a system disk if your original disk is larger than your new disk (or in this case the SSD). You'd still have to a work around to shrink the partition information to the smallest volume that you can do, then do the system restore feature.

Here's a link to StorageCraft procedure on how to do this with ShadowProtect software. (link)

Not sure if there are other system restore software that will allow you to dynamically resize the image to and fro after the fact. I haven't looked at them in a while.


Anyhow, It's also mostly a shun against practice if you are changing disk size of your Master Boot Record, specially when you switch up the hardware type of a mechanical disk to a solid state drive, thus why its best to do a fresh install.

I had an Emachines desktop like this. The restore discs would only work if the rig was set up exactly as it was fresh out of the box. After a few upgrades, that meant when I needed to restore Windows, I had to take out the added RAM stick and slave hard drive I installed, and plug the original 56k modem back in.

Would it be possible to shrink the current partition down to 60GB (make absolutely sure it's equal or LESS than the size of the new drive)? Then go and create your backup...see if it'll restore. Just might work.

I agree with jbaz, you should just go with a clean install, at least you will get rid of all that bloat-ware that comes with HP computers. However if you do not want to go that route (or can't) then try Norton Ghost, while I have not used it in a while it used to always do the trick for me. Either way, good luck!