Restored Imaged Backup, No Windows Installations Found

Hi, so I was cleaning up my friends laptop which has two 500gb hard drives in it. The boot drive started clicking and powering off, then spinning back up again so I quickly and successfully took an image of the boot drive before it died.

I've now restored the image onto the other 500GB drive and taken the original boot drive out. However, I completely forgot about or mistakenly unchecked to image the system reserved partition so I now have 100mb of free space at the beginning of the hard drive, before the primary partition. The windows installation does not boot and it is not found in the Windows 7 system recovery disc.

Something made me think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the Windows 7 partition cannot boot with free space preceeding SO I booted into GParted to try and resize the Windows 7 partition taking away the 100mb of free space. This didn't work as it said there were bad sectors and to run chkdsk on the drive then try again. I booted into the system recovery disc and fired up command prompt and tried to run chkdsk but was told that "The device is not ready".

I am now completely stuck and have no idea what to do. I want to get this to boot into Windows at all costs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

AddRAM said:

Windows doesn`t boot because you did not include the System Reserved Partition when you made the image.

You`ll have to mark the windows partition Active and run startup repair up to 3x, but this still may not work.

Got it to work without the System reserved partition somehow. Booted up Macrium Reflect's recovery CD thing and click fix boot problems and it worked straight away after that!

Just found out that it's not the hard drive that's failed, its a connector inside the laptop that's failing, so I stuck the old hard drive back in and I'll get to fixing/replacing the connector later.

Anyway, thank you very much for replying!