Windows 7: Having problem with system image recovery

My system disk has crashed and I have bought a replacement. However when I try to use system image recovery to restore onto the new disk I get a message .. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found ... Diskpart lists the new disk as online. Do I have to manually set this disk as a system disk before trying the restore? Any help greatly appreciated.

Hello and welcome Brocky just a stab in the dark mate but have you tried clicking on Properties for that drive in Device Manager and does it tell you if it is working properly or not?

THanks for the reply and sorry for the delay in my response. I have persevered and finally discovered that:
> you can't restore a system image to a new hard disk without MS intervention -- their help desk had to give me the appropriate rights for this to happen (spoke with them for over an hour)
> because my Windows 7 was an upgrade rather than a full purchase, that caused further issues again only resolved after MS help desk intervention.
> running the system image restore process has a BIG trap for the unwary (which I was). In the early stage of the process it marks all hard disks found on the computer (including USB drives) for a full disk format. This list is only visible if a button is clicked. It is then necessary to unset the drives that aren't to be zapped. Needless to say, I lost a USB drive of irreplacable videos and photos before I discovered this secret. WHat a stupid piece of programming! Anyway, I'm back working again and trying to restore the lost videos from the source camcorder with limited success. Thanks again for your comments.

You may be able to recover your videos with recuva. I just recently did and most were usable. Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

Sounds like rubbish to me. I have done it before using both Windows inbuilt imaging to new HDD straight out of the bag. I've also used (free) Macrium Reflect which is how I transferred to an SSD.
The only thing with Windows 7 inbuilt imaging is that the replacement HDD must be at least the same size as the old HDD the image was made from. This is because the MBR partition table in the image must be compatible with the size of the new HDD.

Maybe this is my problem? I'm trying to image 131Gb of data from a 500 Gb drive onto a new 250Gb SSD. I've tried Win 7 (fail, just like the OP here, it WILL NOT find the image to restore from, even when it's very clearly on another internal HDD) and Macrium (fail, all I got was a flashing cursor upon boot after "cloning" the drive). No where does Micro$haft mention this in their "help" files.

Yes mate and just about what I was saying re the Ease todo stuff in your own thread!!.

I just found another tool called "Samsung Data Migration" from a search. Installed and in three clicks it's up and running. Hopefully when the copy is done everything will be transferred over. If not, I'll look into the program you linked. Thanks!