System image restore failed, error 0x80042412

Tsremix777 said:

That's not the way I read the OP's post. The old hard drive it failing, they made an image to a 1tb external drive. Purchased a new 750gb hard drive & installed it & then tried to install the image to that new drive, with no success.

This is correct.

Ranger4 said:

What program did you use to create the image of the old hard drive?.

I just used the default windows image backup.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Yes it would be nice to know what you used to create the image and restore disk :)
This is the recommended program to do the tasks with,
Imaging with free Macrium

Windows not so much :/

Thanks! I'll look into it. If I'm unable to get this working I'll give it a shot.

paul1149 said:

It looks like this is a backup image made by the Win7 built-in facility? Can you navigate to the external hard drive via the restore function? If not, have you tried having the external drive plugged in at boot?

I'm not sure what you mean. I can select "install drivers" and browse through the external hard drive's files, so it is accessible. (See attached image) It's also detecting the backup on the external hard drive.

Ok then, it's seeing the backup image. The error message probably refers to the new drive then. Can you boot into the old drive and see if the new drive is visible from there in Disk Manager?

paul1149 said:

Ok then, it's seeing the backup image. The error message probably refers to the new drive then. Can you boot into the old drive and see if the new drive is visible from there in Disk Manager?

Yes, the new hard drive is detected and healthy.

I just realized that her old (dying) hard drive is 1tb, not 500gb.

Ranger4 said:

@ Tsremix777.
How much of the old 1tb drive had been used & was it all in one partition. The problem could be that you are trying to install a 1tb image onto a 750gb hard drive.

As paul1149 has requested could you post a screen shot on Disc Management showing the old hard drive & this will help us workout the best way to fix this.

This Forum tutorial will help you with the screen shot.

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

About 220gb are used, I'll attach a screenshot of the disk management. Please note that the old, dying hard drive is (C:), the new internal hard drive is (E:), and the external hard drive (which contains the image) is (F:)

I think Ranger4 is correct about the size problem. I would make a decision here on whether or not you want to preserve the Factory restore partition. If so, use a commercial backup prog to clone the entire disk, and then adjust partition sizes during the restoration. If not, you can simply shrink the C partition in place using Windows disk management, then take a new windows image and restore it.

Thanks for the help, guys. I went ahead and followed ThrashZone's advice and made another image with macrium, then decreased the main partition size to fit on the new hard drive, and it worked flawlessly.