Windows 7 - A note on Image Backup

Hi all, as you already know, Windows 7 image backup facility takes a backup foy our entire installation.

What I found out recently though is that although my installation was only 80GB, it made a note that the volume it came from was 598GB (two 300gb disks in raid 0).

I wanted to use the restore to re-instate the installation onto one drive and use the other for a free BSD distro.

The error mesage when I used the restore disc to recover the installation told me that the volume was now too small to re-instate on, and a bigger volume was to be used. I had to reinstate the RAID in order to reinstate my image backup.

Did you image the DRIVE or PARTITION?

Using other backup utilities (Norton or Acronis), when making "base" images (after freshly paving a system), i will shrink the partition using Acronis Disk Director, then make the partition image... this gives me more options when recovering later...

Check the settings given when you cue up the Windows 7 backup image to reimage.

There are settings which cover refitting.

I had similar problems when I replaced my hard drive. Thought it was going to be a doddle to make an image and then restore it on the new drive, it wouldn't do it - tried partitioning the new drive to the same size as my old C, tried making it bigger than my old C, but nope - had to do a clean install from scratch.

Not impressed, but then, the files & settings transfer wizard in XP never worked properly either

What imaging program were you using?

Macrium Reflect free version is highly recommended if you don't get the variability you want with Windows 7 Backup Imaging. It does block out a lot of options, seems.