Restoring an image

sunbeamtalbot · 03 Dec 2009

I have made an image using the windows 7 program to do this to an external hard drive on my new Acer ultraportable

What is the procedure to restore the image. Do I first use the windows system disc that I made or is the image bootable if I make the USB HDD the first bootable drive

Also can the image be made/copied to the notebook's harddrive, into a different partition, and restored from there. This is the method I use with Drive Image on my desktop machines as I very rarely use an external HDD device to restore - Drive Image installs Caldera DOS at boot up to manage the process.

Are there any simple imaging programs that would work like Drive Image whereby I can restore from the Acer's own HDD directly without going ton external HDD or USB stick

Thanks

Jonathan_King · 03 Dec 2009

The image is not bootable; use the Repair disk you made if you can't boot into Windows.

harpua · 03 Dec 2009

I don't know the answer to the first part of your question but just wanted to point out that the problem with storing your back up image on a different partition of the same hard drive your system is on is that in the event that hard drive fails, you lose everything including your backup. So that is not a good practice, imo, unless you also have backup images on external media.

That said, I don't know about the other available programs but Acronis TIH can restore from anywhere the backup image (including images made with the Windows Backup & Restore utility) happens to be, either from within the app, at boot by pressing F11 if you have activated Acronis' "startup recovery manager," or by booting from a rescue CD (which one creates ahead of time from within the program).

gregrocker · 03 Dec 2009

I use Win7 backup imaging on seven home computers here.

I make a primary formatted partition on each computer to store the image first, then copy it to an external in case of HD failure.

If an OS fails, I boot into the Win7 DVD or Repair CD and select "Recover Using An Image" which will autodetect the image in a primary formatted drive, or if placed in the root and kept by the same exact name WindowsImageBackup in the external. I keep them in folders for each computer in the external otherwise.

So far it has worked perfectly, except for once when my external had a bad block, but since the CD had also detected the image I stored in a primary on the same HD as the bollixed beta, it reimaged it from the same drive.

Brink · 03 Dec 2009

Hello Sunbeamtalbot, and welcome to Seven Forums.

In addition to the above, the tutorial below can help show you how to restore the system image backup.

System Image Recovery

Hope this helps,
Shawn

sunbeamtalbot · 03 Dec 2009

harpua said:

I don't know the answer to the first part of your question but just wanted to point out that the problem with storing your back up image on a different partition of the same hard drive your system is on is that in the event that hard drive fails, you lose everything including your backup. So that is not a good practice, imo, unless you also have backup images on external media.

I am aware of the potential of HDD failure but the reason I like having on the same drive, and have been doing it for at least 7- 8 years, is that when I try a new program or modify or suspect that there is something wrong I just restore the image - which because with both my desktops ,win 2000 and XP , which way less than 3Gb C drives and therefore can be done in a matter of minutes which means I do not spend hours or days trying to rectify a problem.

What I am finding is that win 7 is very large and I would really like to get it down by more than half - currently is taking up 14GB.

whs · 03 Dec 2009

What I am finding is that win 7 is very large and I would really like to get it down by more than half - currently is taking up 14GB.

LOL - you really call this big? The footprint of my Vista images is around 60GBs. If you want smaller images, try free Macrium. Your system should image in 6GBs.

Image your system with free Macrium - Vista Forums

gregrocker · 04 Dec 2009

whs said:

What I am finding is that win 7 is very large and I would really like to get it down by more than half - currently is taking up 14GB.

LOL - you really call this big? The footprint of my Vista images is around 60GBs. If you want smaller images, try free Macrium. Your system should image in 6GBs.

Image your system with free Macrium - Vista Forums

Thanks for the tut. I have wanted to try Macium since SIW2 recommends it.

So does it compress that much?

My sys images are between 15g and 72g.

whs · 04 Dec 2009

So does it compress that much?

Well, I can only tell you what I see. I use Macrium on Win7 right now. My Win7 has a footprint of 15.8GBs (I have a seperate data partition) and the Macrium image is 6.8GBs. If I compare that to my Ghost images on Vista, I think it is pretty good. Plus it wrote the last image in 3.42 minutes (from the SSD to an internal HDD) - about 10 minutes to an external disk.

gregrocker · 04 Dec 2009

whs said:

So does it compress that much?

Well, I can only tell you what I see. I use Macrium on Win7 right now. My Win7 has a footprint of 15.8GBs (I have a seperate data partition) and the Macrium image is 6.8GBs. If I compare that to my Ghost images on Vista, I think it is pretty good. Plus it wrote the last image in 3.42 minutes (from the SSD to an internal HDD) - about 10 minutes to an external disk.

Damn I love it when freeware beats the complexicated paid programs.

SIW2 (my teacher) recommends it so I should have already tried it by now. And several posts today warned about Win7 backup failures.

Will try it on one of seven machines here soon. Thanks again!