Wrong system image type?

Luna TGaP · 11 Jul 2014

I've recently bought a new WD 1TB HDD to replace my (really) old Samsung 500GB HDD. I created a system image, then unplugged the old HDD, plugged in the new one and put in the win7 installation disk. I went to restore it from a system image, however, it said something along the lines of not being able to restore because it's EFI and not BIOS? The BIOS itself then went and died, and by this I mean literally only the BIOS clock worked, everything else was pixelated and would not interact with my curosr, so I flashed it and it's now working again, i.e. I'm back at stage one. The system image was created on a Simple NTFS volume, which I created myself as the HDD came completely formatted, not partitions or volumes or anything. I'm really hoping this is an error on my part and not a hardware failure, but we'll see what happens. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need any more information or if the information I've given is too vague. Thanks in advance.

EDIT:
I don't plan on using the old HDD once I've got everything transferred to the new one. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just 20GB away from being full and horribly slow.

Computer0304 · 11 Jul 2014

It is most likely not hardware failure because your new HDD is likely formatted with GPT. You should try copying the data off of the old HDD.

Luna TGaP · 11 Jul 2014

Sorry, I don't really understand what you mean by simply 'copying'. How would I go about this?

Computer0304 · 11 Jul 2014

Connect the old drive to a PATA or SATA to USB connector depending on if it uses PATA or SATA. Connect it to your computer AFTER booting it up and copy important files off of it. Something like this is good because it has both PATA/IDE and SATA.

Luna TGaP · 11 Jul 2014

I still don't get what you mean by 'copy'. I don't know if I wasn't clear, but the old drive has everything on it and the new on absolutely nothing. I want to use the new drive to replace the old one, then throw the old one away, which involves copying absolutely everything, including hidden and system files, so surely I'd need to clone or image the hard drive? My problem is I'm having difficulty doing so. Either way, if the old drive isn't connected initially, then the computer won't boot up as there'd be no OS surely? Thanks in advance, I'm going offline for tonight.

Computer0304 · 11 Jul 2014

OK, I mean that you will have to do a clean install and then copy documents off of your old drive if nothing else works.

Luna TGaP · 11 Jul 2014

That's a shame.

I'll try to restore from the image once more tomorrow as it's still making a second backup now (just in case I mucked the first one up), then I'll try what you've suggested. I'll post any updates on the situation as soon as I can. Although, if I don't post anything tomorrow I won't be posting anything until next Saturday as I'll be away.

Computer0304 · 11 Jul 2014

Ok, good luck.

mjf · 11 Jul 2014

Can you confirm the formatting for the old 500GB and the new WD 1TB. ie MBR or GPT.
Hard Drive - GPT or MBR
Is your BIOS set for a UEFI or MBR boot? If it is UEFI then the old 500GB drive would be GPT. If you want to make a system image for a UEFI/GPT system I'd recommend you use (free) Macrium Reflect.

If the old 500GB is MBR as I suspect then use this tutorial to make sure the WD 1TB is MBR.
Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk
Be careful to work on the 1TB drive.
Then try your system image restore again.
If you still have problems you could try Macrium Reflect instead of the Windows inbuilt system image software. Many people much prefer Macrium anyway.

Luna TGaP · 07 Sep 2014

Hi guys, sorry this took me so long to reply but things have been happening on my side of the screen. In other news, a lot of developments have been made. In the end, I gave up on imaging and had a second look for some cloning software. Picked up AOEMI and it worked first time, no problems whatsoever. Not sure how I didn't find it the first time to be honest. However, after having successfully gotten everything running, the next day I got stuck in the 'failure to configure updates loop' and although I managed to get out of it once, I'm proud to say not even I thought I could break my computer this much. I'll be starting a new thread for my new problem as it's fairly unrelated to this one. Thanks again for your support guys and for anyone reading the thread for a solution to their problem; I'd use AOEMI backup (it comes with cloning / backup tools and some other goodies). :)