Windows 7: Imaging with free Macrium

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Last edited by whs; 23 Feb 2013 at 07:28 PM..

I overwritten an entire image onto another drive, including the partitions. I have a backup of one drive, but not the larger drive. It's equal to having a 500 gig drive and a 100 gig drive, if you take the 100 gig drive and restore it onto the 500 gig, it will remove whatever partitions were on the 500 gig drive and restore what was on the 100 gig drive. Either way it is gone, for good, there was some odds and ends, stuff I saved for about a year, stuff I never really did anything with for a while, so maybe it was for the better

Bad News Part B: I restored a partition image onto another drive, including the MBR and regardless what I've done, Windows won't boot into the drive.

The way to do it is to resize the 500GB partition to give you at least 100GB unallocated space then restore into that.

I don't follow ?

If you shrink the existing partition you can keep the data in it and restore the 100GB image into the space you have freed up.

I find the explanation of your issue still confusing. Maybe rephrase it.
For example I can only guess what
"I overwritten an entire image onto another drive, including the partitions."
means.

I have two drives, one smaller, one larger. I had only done a entire HDD backup on the smaller drive, not the larger one. When I restored the image, I restored the smaller HDD image onto the larger HDD image, including all partitions that were on the smaller HDD, completely overwriting any data and partitions that were on the larger HDD. As someone said it should shift the partitions, and still keep the data, that is untrue if you do a image restore.

You need to shrink the partitions youself before starting the restore so that you have sufficient unallocated space to restore into. Macrium will not do it for you.

That doesn't work.

In what way doesn't it work?

I've tried everything, restoring a image, cloning a partition. In all cases the new drive that I want to have windows boot from, doesn't boot, I get an error "a device driver is inaccessible" with a type of cx00ecd error. I have two other installs of Windows which are on two different drives, two different partitions. They both work, I don't want either of those to be the Windows boot partition. I want the new drive which is giving me an error to be the Windows boot partition. When I boot into Windows PE 3.1 and I select the option to fix "windows boot errors" the new drive I want to boot too, is not listed, only a USB drive and one of the drives with a windows boot partition.

The data that I lost is gone, because I over-written it with a backup of another drive therefore the partitions were not shifted, they were just over written. I'm over that, so that is not a concern anymore. The concern is getting the new drive to boot into windows, then I can get things in order. I have contacted Macrium, and twenty four went by with no reply, I don't know why this is causing this much problems, something is not registering with the MBR and I have no way of fixing this. I have the option to ReDeploy but that doesn't work either, I tried that option hoping the "a device driver is inaccessible" error would be resolved if some drivers were feed into the drive that I want the windows partition to boot from, unfortunately it didn't work.