I had two hard drives on this computer originally, one with win 7 32bit and all my files, the other blank. I made a complete system backup image on the blank hard drive and then put win 7 64bit on. I formatted and gave the old drive to my brother, and while the backup is clearly on my computer because i can find it, windows system restore says there are no backups. Any way I'm getting all my files back? I can post screen shots if needed.
Hello mtzsphardawg and welcome to Seven Forums.
I'm a little confused by your post so let me see if I understand what you're saying. Your computer had two drives. Let's call them Drive 1 and Drive 2. Drive 1 had "win 7 32bit and all my files" and Drive 2 was blank. You then "...made a complete system backup image on the blank hard drive and then put win 7 64bit on." So the original blank Drive 2 now contains "win 7 32bit and all my files" as well as a copy of a win 7 64 bit operating system.
You then "...formatted and gave the old drive to my brother..." I'm guessing you mean you formatted Drive 1 (erased everything.) That would leave you with a WindowsImageBackup containing a 32 bit operating system and all your files, as well as a win 7 64 bit operating system on Drive 2. And now you want to use the win 7 64 bit operating system to restore a WindowsImageBackup of the original 32 bit operating system? I think that would create compatibility issues. Not to mention whether or not your computer has all the necessary drivers required by the 64 bit operating system. As well as how Drive 2 was partitioned during the various procedures.
Could you post a screen shot of your Disk Management? You might be able to use one of the Linux operating systems (like Ubuntu or Puppy) to access your personal files and data.
Like marsmimar, I'm confused by your post.
If you made a image of drive 1 and put it on drive 2, it will have to be restored to another drive using a boot/restore disk.
If you had cloned your system to drive 2 it would have worked.
If you want to only recover your files, you can mount the VHD and get them from there. If you want to recover or reinstall your system from that image, that is possible too. All instructions are here: System Image - Recover a Broken Windows 7 System Image
Note: for recovering your files ,you double click on the VHD in My Computer after Step 2 of the tutorial.
You say you made an image of your old 32 bit OS on the 2nd HDD then installed Windows 64 bit on that HDD. If you can still see that image it must be on another partition.
So yes definitely post a disk management screenshot and state what is on each partition.
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