how to save windows 8.1 hard drive image before installing windows 7

whs said:

Ignatz, the 5.3.7290 iso is uploading. That's the EFI one.

Aye aye; I'll get it.

ignatzatsonic said:

ron7000 said:

then copy the saved win8 image files back to each partition on the drive.

Image files aren't copied back. They are formally restored after booting from the recovery disk.

You can drill into an image file in an Explorer interface and copy individual files to some other location, but you need to formally restore the partition if you want to return a drive to its former state.

what then is the "formal restore" process?
It confuses me that you say they can't be copied back. Isn't the image file created by copying the data of the partition in the first place, into some container file format that we call an image file? I guess i have a hard time not seeing data on the partition as just data. Like I said previously that's exactly how it works in linux and I can manually tar a whole partition into a single tar file... or zip file if i want to compress it, or into and iso file, and so on.
But i found a spare drive to mess around with, will see how it goes and who gets to say i told you so :)

can someone quickly explain, or provide a link, about the windows 8 boot manager?
Is that similar to what grub or grub2 (grand unified boot loader) is in the linux world?
Forgot to mention, when i slaved the win8 laptop drive to my pc and booted my pc (which has a uefi motherboard) it booted the laptop drive, and my pc actually came up. i went into my pc uefi settings and disabled all the boot devices except for my win7 drive, and is when i noticed windows boot manager as a device all by itself. in my uefi settings i had my win7 drive set as #1 boot device, with dvd drive 2nd but it seems the windows boot manager of the laptop drive was good enough to trump my existing settings and make itself #1, which then caused the win8 laptop drive to boot.

it worked, mostly.

so the original drive was a toshiba 500gb that came with laptop, the partition layout was this:
- 500mb FAT32 primary, 50mb used, label = ESP.
- 40mb FAT32 primary, 512 bytes used, label = DIAGS.
- 128mb unformatted primary, no label.
- 490mb NTFS primary, 283.6mb used, label = WINRETOOLS.
- 452gb NTFS primary, 108gb used, label = OS.
- 350mb NTFS primary, 304mb used, no label.
- 11.6GB NTFS primary, 11.0gb used, label = PBR IMAGE.

i used both macrium reflect 5.3 and aomei backup std 2.2.
for each program i saved one large image file, around 80gb each.
in both programs you open up the image file and it shows you the partition layout like i describe, with amount used in each.
my spare drive was a WD 320gb, so all partitions kept same size but i shrank the OS partition.
and in win7 disk manager i blanked the new 320gb drive, set it to GPT.
i used reflect first and i was able to create partitions #1..4 no problem on the new WD 320gb disk. from there things got crummy. it eventually let me move partition #5 the OS partition to the new disk but it only did so taking up the remainder of the disk; it didn't let me shrink it. so now my 320gb is partitioned taking up the entire disk, so in win7 disk manager i shrank that partition/volume down to 285gb, which left me with around 12gb unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. from here reflect would not let me copy the last 2 paritions (304mb & 11.0gb used) any which way i tried. so i went to aemoei; first I used the win7 disk manager to partition the remainder of the disk to 350mb then the remainder of the disk which was around 11.8gb. aomei let me restore those 2 partitions no problem. put the wd 320gb in the laptop, booted up and ran fine like nothing had happened. so far so good.

once logged in, tried to do recovery, either "refresh your pc without affecting your files" and "remove everything and reinstall windows".... could not find the recovery environment

so now i think it's a matter of figuring out how windows 8, and maybe dell, manage their recovery partitions. or is this where that rescue cd comes into play?