System image recovery stops partway through

Petey,
In the procedure I gave him he will let MS format and partition the drives.

I'm trying to avoid any creativity or deviation so that I can if there is a problem and what the problem is.

I just hope he follows the procedure to the letter as I've used the procedure many times with zero failures.

Sometimes the image will not reimage to the same or another HD. This is why it is best to have a second image using Macrium or Paragon's free app to be failsafe.

You can mount the images in Disk Management to access and copy out your files if necessary.

On the Action Tab, select Attach VHD and browse to the image file(s).

Greg,
He will be able to restore the image. We just have to wait for his progress report to see if further steps are required.

Thanks for the tip gregrocker. I also did some manual backing up of files, but that could come in handy as well.

My current plan of action right now is to wipe the hard drive using the guide Petey7 provided me and then to use my 32bit Windows 7 DVD to perform the System Recovery, going off of the steps karlsnooks posted. Just waiting for my HDD to wipe right now though.

Wiping the drive with the CLEAN ALL command of DiskPart will eliminate many possible problems and is a good idea although I'm not sure that it is necessary but will certainly do no harm.

Great news thread followers! I ended up leaving the system restore going while I left for a shopping trip. When I got back I saw my laptop was sitting at the Windows 7 login screen with the same users I had backed it up with.

I suppose the end result of this was that I just needed to be very patient! Seeing the restore get a third of the way in in just 15 minutes was very misleading in my case. Even after doing the wipe (not sure if it helped or not), the project took somewhere between 3 and 7hrs.

Thank you for everyone who took the time to read the post, and especially to those who offered their suggestions. I feel a little more complete now that my treasured documents and programs are all the way I left them.

That is a very long time.

How big was the image? Unless it was many hundreds of gb's , there is something wrong there. You are fortunate it worked in the end.


I recommend not relying entirely on windows sys image. There are other free imaging solutions which are much more flexible.