#21 ODIN 0.34 reports partition resizing will occur when it will not resize partitions.cur.

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

I made a backup of a 4GB SATA SSD with (2) NTFS partitions, one custom/non-NTFS/non-FAT partition, and some unpartitioned space. Though not necessary as no partition was greater than 2000MB, the option to max out at 2000 MB file size was set. Also, Save only used blocks, and GZip compression were selected. The whole disk was backed up.

The files the backup created were something like: foo.mbr, foo-Partition10000.img, foo-Partion20000.img, and foo-Partition30000.img. To restore without issue, a manual renaming of files was required: foo-Partition1.img, foo-Partion2.img, foo-Partition3.img.

When restore of the whole disk to a larger 8GB SSD was attempted, this message occurred:

Warning
/!\ The available disk space on the target drive is larger than the size of the image to restore. Do you want to continue (NTFS will be resized by you should run chkdsk /f afterwards.)?

I clicked Yes.

This was worrisome. The first (NTFS) and third (non-NTFS/non-FAT, special partition) were identical in size because the third partition was used by a special partition mirroring service. If the sizes of either partition were to have changed, the service would have failed upon booting the restored image.

Thankfully, no partition resizing occurred at all, so the restore was successful and functional. Any automatic resizing would have corrupted the restore in a way that chkdsk /f could not fix.

ODIN does the "right thing" when multiple partitions exist on a whole-disk restore. There is no way ODIN would know what to do. It cannot know which partitions should be resized or how much space to allocate between the multiple partitions. The bug is that ODIN says it will resize partitions when it will not. It should not report a resize will take place in this situation.

Kudos to foresight to fully backup unmounted partitions even when the option to store only used space is selected! The non-NTFS/non-FAT, unmounted third partition was storage for a unique system service and unused space would have been impossible for ODIN to determine. ODIN restored this special partition with no loss in functionality to the supported service.