Hard Driver Failure

[CoM_Solaufein]

My backup computer hard drive is getting ready to fail so I did the smart thing for once and made a system image of the entire drive before the drive fails completely. The system image is on a portable drive, how do I get that content restored onto a new hard drive?

[Bartimaeus]

What tool did you make the system image with? The entire OS + storage combination, just the storage drive/partition, or..?

[CoM_Solaufein]

The tool that comes with Windows 7. The entire OS and storage on the C drive was imaged.

[Bartimaeus]

So...if I'm not mistaken, you'd need to get a Windows installation disk/drive, (or a Windows repair disk/drive), boot from it, go into Windows repair instead of Windows install, Windows image recovery, and it should hopefully detect it from the other drive. You should also exclude any disks for reformatting/restoration when it asks you to - at least, for any drives you don't want to be wiped.

 

Windows unfortunately, while having other repair options built in, does not have the re-imaging tool accessible without the installation/repair disk. If your OS is a 64bit version, and you have the dual 32bit/64bit copy of the Windows installer, you will not able to use that copy of the Windows installer, because it defaults to the 32bit setup, which will not function when trying to restore to/from a 64bit version, and there's no way to switch to the 64bit version, as far as I'm aware. It's pretty stupid. If you're using a flash drive as your bootable Windows install/repair disk, you must take out the flash drive directly prior to actually initiating the restore process, (when it asks to confirm your options and that you want to reformat the selected drives - you can do it a little before that, too, if you're not sure), otherwise the restore will fail for no particular reason. Also stupid, I know. If you're restoring from a network drive, you will have to manually add your network drivers from a driver .inf file, which can be a bit of an...obscure process. This applies even if the generic Microsoft driver would normally work - the Windows installer will not load it. The entire Windows 7 re-imaging process is pretty arcane, from having spent a large amount of time playing with it.

Edited August 30, 2014 by Bartimaeus

[CoM_Solaufein]

Wonderful. Why make something that should be easy, easy. My OS is 64 bit. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Its working so far. 300Gigs will take a while judging by the status bar.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Okay restore is complete but my 1TB hard drive is showing up as a 500G hard drive like my old one.

[Humanoid]

I imagine it just created a 500GB partition on your 1TB drive. Use the Disk Management tool in Windows ("Create and format hard disk partitions") to extend it.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Thanks just did that. Now I can update various software since I haven't used it since January this year.