Windows 7 restore FRUSTRATIOn

TheRogerz · 28 Jan 2012

NOTE: Complete System info following post. My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

If anyone can help and or point me in the right direction, I will be MOST grateful. Here is my dilemma.

Two weeks ago my lovely wifey wanted to show me some pictures of Kate Winslet's new clothing ads...or perfume...whichever. At any rate she had renewed our anti virus software, but not downloaded the update. So she was on a website, upprotected when a virus was downloaded. Needless to say, it wrought havoc on the computer. Not to fear though, right? Because like a good boy I had purchased an External Verbatim HDD with 500 GB of memory and had created a system image of our hard drive using the Windows 7 utility, and also created a boot disk.

I used the disk to attempt to repair the start up/boot options because Windows wouldn't even give me the option to boot in Safe mode. That failed and I also used the repair disk to attempt to restore to an earlier restore point. NOTHING.

So I tell my wife I am going to have to certainly restore using the system image. I boot into the recovery CD, choose the option to restore my computer to an earlier image. It prompts me to connect my Hard Drive, which I do and power on. And it does not recognize a system image. Says to make sure the HDD is plugged in and to refresh. I refresh...and nothing. So I go to advanced options. It gives me two: choose a system network, or install the drivers for the device. I go to that option, and I am then allowed to view the disks on the computer. Sure enough, my H: drive VERBATIM is there. I go to that folder and there is my computer FOLDER<backup folder<and 157 folders all zipped up. No matter what I do, windows says there is no system image, even though I used Windows to create it.

PART 2. So, I went to my mom's today, and said...maybe I can use her computer to save a system image since she has Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I plug in my hard drive, go to the VERBATIM hard drive and check it out OK to make sure my wife has not done anything funky with it, and what do I get. The generic manilla folder icon (BRANNA is the computer name) on the H: drive has now changed. The icon by BRANNA is not a manilla folder, but the system restore icon. I click on it and it asks if I want to restore my system using this image. WTF????? I didn't want to screw that up, so I brought it back home to see if by some dark magic it was going to work. Nope. Back to windows not recognizing any image on my HDD. Window's 7 will recognize the system image on my mom's computer, but not mine??? Man oh man.

If I need to provide anymore information, please let me know. I am by no means a computer wiz, so I will try to follow whatever solutions anyone suggests. I am just baffled as to why windows does not recognize a system image it created! Thanks to anyone in advance for taking the time to read this!

SYSTEM INFO
15.6" diagonal HD BrightView widescreen display
Presents 1366 x 768 resolution (WXGA) ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics
Provide 128MB display cache memory, 128MB GDDR2 sideport memory and up to 1534MB total graphics memory AMD Athlon II dual-core mobile processor M300
Provides powerful performance with 2GHz speed, 3.2GT/s, and 1MB L2 cache 3GB of DDR3 system memory
Furnishes enough memory for today's demanding applications and can be expanded to 4GB 250GB SATA hard drive, 5400 rpm

JimLewandowski · 28 Jan 2012

Windows Backup and Restore has 2 ways to save hard disk information:

file backup (done at the file level)

and

system image (done at the hard disk BLOCK level)

Since you said you have 157 folders all zipped up, those are file backups. In the root of your verbatim drive, those file backups will be stored in a folder called "whateveryourcomputernameiscalled". Inside that folder is a folder beginning with "\Backup". Inside that are all those .zip files which house your files. That sounds like what you described.

If you performed a system image alone or included a system image along when you did a FILE backup, the system image would be stored in the ROOT of your verbatim drive in a folder named WindowsImageBackup. The included system image option is done by checking the box ("include a system image of drives: listofdrives) at the bottom of the File backup window LET ME CHOOSE option

It sounds like you did not do a system image, but rather ONLY a file backup. I hate to say it, but it sounds like user error. Windows 7 is not very descriptive on exactly what's going on in Backup and Restore.