Restore does not detect new hard disk

I've got a problem restoring Win7.

I have 1-year old asus with a 320 seagate disk that has shown "clicks of death" a few times. I got a hitachi 160Gb as a replacement but Win restore will not recognize this disk (To avoid warranty-replies: sending it in for warranty costs more than a new disk and they will probably not find it faulty since the click is there occasionally).

I tried making a backup of c:-only (abt 75Gb, deleted the d:-partition), tried setting the interface to ide instead of ide->ahci, tried using diskpart-clean before restoring but nothing works.

As a bonus the asus-recovery-DVD will copy itself to the HDU, but on reboot (press F9, took me a couple of hours to find that one) it will error "can not open file c:\recovery.dat".

I'm close to installing linux, if it were not for canon not supplying a linux-driver for the scanner.

Is there any solution (besides hoping the seagate won't crash)?

I would try the Hitachi as a stand alone drive to see if you can get the system to recognize it. Load your OS on it to verify it boots properly. Once this has been verified to be good then place it back in the second drive position and plug the Seagate back in and reboot. If the Hitachi is not recognized at this point it is not willing to play well with the Seagate in the Drive 0 position. I don't know is you have a Drive 0 with a Drive 1 as Slave or both drives are Masters, i.e. Drive 0 Master with no slave and Drive 1 Master with no slave.

Thanx for replying. At the moment the hitachi is the only disk in the system (no room for other disks, its a laptop).
The disk is OK, linux installs to it and runs from it without any problem.

Problem solved
The EASEUS-backup-program (freeware) had no trouble restoring the disk. MBR and track 0 were copied to the new disk and the 75Gb partition was copied. System working again.

2 things to keep in mind if you want to use EASEUS:
- you need a CD to create the bootdisk, DVD will not work
- when restoring EASEUS has trouble finding the backup-files. Sometimes they show, sometimes not. Waiting with clicking OK until the DVD is spinning helps, otherwise eject and retry.