A couple of days ago my hard drive started failing so I created a Windows Image Backup on an external hard drive. Today I received my new hard drive and installed it, unfortunately when I tried to restore the backup I get the message Windows could not find any file backups on this computer even though the external hard drive shows in my computer.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
start your computer with the win7 dvd, press any key when prompted. go to repair options, and if you select "restore", there should be an option to restore from an image. then navigate to where you created the image file.
I have tried that, but it does not find my external harddrive.
1) Connect your ext HDD
2) Boot from a System Repair disk
3) When in the "System Recovery Options" screen
4) Select Install Drivers. When it says insert media click OK. You will be presented with a Windows explorer screen.
5) Go to the top and navigate to your external HDD (forget about drive letters - they will be different).
6) Proceed like normal explorer and open it. You are looking for a folder in the root of the ext HDD called exactly WindowsImageBackup.
7) Select cancel until you get back to "Select an Image" option and select the image you browsed to and proceed as normal.
The key thing is you must have a folder called WindowsImageBackup in a root partition.
You can use command prompt to find your image but I think the above may be easier.
Hi mjf, thanks for your reply.
I followed your instructions 1-7 with no problems, unfortunately when the WindowsImageBackup was found in "Select an Image" there is a box at the bottom of the screen called "Files of type" with Setup Information inside. When I tried to find this within WindowsImageBackup it could not find any of these type of files.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
I'm not sure what the "Files of Type" is about without seeing the screen.
When you proceed to step 6. You are verifying that an image of the correct name can be located ie. WindowImageBackup exists in a root partition. Don't select it at this stage. This is just verifying that the System Repair disk should be able to see a valid image.
You are merley using the install Driver option to get access to the Explorer function. Hitting cancel (a couple of times I think) backs you up out of the install driver option until you are at the "select an image" screen. You pick the select an image option and go next. Then one of the images (maybe only one) should be the one you found via the Explorer search.
Select this image and proceed until you have the final "Finish" button to press.
It's getting late here. I'll look tomorrow to see how you go.
Hi mjf,
Thanks for your reply, I have attached 4 photos taken my screen after selecting an image option. As I said earlier I cannot find any Files of type "Set up information", only the files shown in the photos.
Thanks.
in the "files of type" box, click the little black arrow on the right, and see if there are any other file types listed. i think you need an img file. (i've never actually had to do a restore from image file yet, so if you would rather wait for mjf to reply...)
Johnp,
What you did was enter the image folder progressively until you got to the final list of files including the large .vhd file at the bottom of the list.
That's ok but all I wanted is for you is to verify that the system repair can see a [WindowsImageBackup] and you have done this. So when you hit cancel,..,cancel
until you reach back at the "Select an Image screen" and go search the computer for an image, the image you have just seen should appear (because we know it's there). Highlight it and proceed as per a normal image recover.
Post back what you find.
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