Windows 7: Does my system image to a new hard drive make it bootable?

I used Macrium to make a system image of my existing drive onto a new hard drive and I made the system rescue boot disk too. (HP all-in-one desktop)



I'm not certain about the next step. Do I just replace the old drive with the new one and boot up? It is a system image, so why not? What is boot disk for?

That should work fine.

Thank you for your response. I hope you're right. I just checked it on dskmgmt and it's not an exact image since it isn't partitioned into the system, OS and recovery parts. It is also inactive.

I guess I should mark it as active before replacing the currently old active drive?

If you put the image on the new drive it won't work. You would have to restore the image to a drive and it should all be fine. The Boot disk would be for booting into Advance Startup Options.

To restore the image I put onto the new drive would then involve buying another drive? Did I understand that correctly? My old hard drive is dying (slowly I hope), so I bought a new drive and made a system image on it. How do I restore that without buying another new drive? I think I'm missing something basic and have been reading the forum but I'm still a little confused.

The image is over 80GB.

Sorry I told you wrong. I did not realize you were going to boot from the actual image. The image is compressed and would not boot on its own. You would have to restore it to another HDD. If there is room on the old HDD, make another partition that is big enough and make the image on it. You can then restore from there to the new HDD.

Thanks Bigmck! There's some nice simple explanations on this forum which is better than most -- or maybe I'm slower than I should be when it comes to computers.

So now I know I'll have to do a clean install -- just finished making the disc and printing the instructions -- or partition and make another system image somewhere.

I already made the system image onto my old, old hard drive, but I didn't partition to do it -- just put it in with the XP windows system, and someone told me they'd kill each other. This failing hard drive I'm on -- I got this HP computer 1 year and 1 month ago -- so right after the warranty expires, I get hard drive failure notices following on the heels of their continued notices to purchase their extended warranty. I thought they must be joking. But then I started to hear those gentle clicking noises.

Since it's a 750 SATA hard drive and I only use about 1/10 of that, I unallocated over half of it thinking that would improve the chances of the bad sectors being put out to pasture. At least the click noises went away.

Can someone give me a hint about what is the easiest and fastest way to partition a disc? It's not in the disc management section on windows. I'm sure there are 1000s of threads here about how to partition your hard drive.............aaahhhh

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So I found what to do in disc management which is right click on the unallocated space -- good enough! Then there's a warning not to make it dynamic. What's dynamic mean?

Another question of a different sort -- I'm trying to remove the cables from my enclosed external (soon to be new internal drive) and I can't make them budge -- it's like they are set in concrete. Is it suppose to be that difficult. I'm worried I might break something if I use my handy pliers.

The boot disc is what is used to do the reimage operation.

Don`t mess with your external, you will break it.

Go to this site Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online and drop down to the bottom of the page and you will see
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Download that and burn on to a DVD at 4x. You can make partitions without any trouble. == As far as Dynamic Disks, just remember that means TROUBLE. You never want those. If you make more than four Primary Partitions on one HDD you will get Dynamic Disks and your PC won't boot.