Windows 7 - System Image Recovery

As suggested try the "System Repair Disk" as the boot DVD which I was going on about before editing my response.

But it looks like the reimage program is locating the image - Correct??
Then when you try to restore the image it says basically it can't find a disk to restore the image to I think. Check that your restore location is correct remembering the drive letter thing.

Hi Guys,
Well i sorted it out finally after hours on end, pulling hair out and kicking the cat (havent got a cat so not sure whose it was)
When i opened back up and restore in control panel I noticed some oo the details in back up location were not correct. So i clicked on "back up now" and got that part done. Then went back to the steps in the guide - booted from system repair disc and it all went through fine.
Im now using the new HDD with the system image on it. So all is well.
Im actually getting longer start up times now which is odd as this drive is faster than the previous one so i'll have to work that one out.

Just wanted to say a huge thanks to Brink and also thanks to mjf for assisting. I reckon i'll be right the second time around as i know what to look for.

Cheers

That's great news Rod. I'm happy to hear that you got it going.

Good you got it working. I still recommend using a second imaging app now and again for security.

thanks guys.

One thing that happened was that i used CCleaner including the registry clean option once the new drive was up and running as i didnt do it before i did the imaging and then rebooted but it must have done some damage as the reboot failed as BOOTMGR was missing. So i had to put the repair disc in and fix that.
Its never happened before using CCleaner which i use on a weekly basis.

"A system image recovery will format everything on each hard drive that was included in a system image, and will only restore what is included (see step 7 in STEP TWO below) in the system image back. Be sure to backup anything that you do not want to lose that is not included in the system image backup first."

If I restore from an Image of a MBR partition to a GTP partition, will it reformat to MBR? Sorry, im a noob....

During the reimage process you will see a screen with a Reformat tick box towards the top left. This has to beOnly when the box is ticked will your full disk to be formatted with a partition structure the same as when it was imaged.
If it is ticked and greyed out (cannot deselect) then you will lose data on other partitions.
So if you can leave it unticked your other partition data should be fine.

Edit: Maybe a poor choice of words.

Hello Winefly,

As MJF pointed out, you could use step 8 or 9 in the STEP TWO section to exclude specific disks and partitions from being affected by the system image recovery.

Yes, it will restore the system image backup to the HDD exactly to how it was when created. In your case, back to MBR.

Hello...first post.

Back story: Clean install to 64gig SSD, nothing but system image on HDD. Had to restore because I messed up while trying to change default user folder locations.

Restore went fine, just wondering if I should have chose to first reformat the C: drive which was an option. What's the difference between choosing to reformat and not. Would it have made much a diff in my case?

Thanks

Hello mv808, and welcome to Seven Forums.

It wouldn't have made any difference. Windows 7 will format whatever drive or partition it's restoring the image backup to by default. Steps 7, 8, and 9 are for if you wanted to exclude any partitions or HDD(s) from being included in the restore process to prevent them from being formatted or deleted. That's all.