Win7 system image backup advanced format compatibility

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cyanna said:

The 3 GB options are too small.

Could you please explain what you mean by that? If you meant too few options, what other options would you suggest?

clonezilla sometimes causes errors on boot after restore and you might need to perform a "start up repair"

? I have used Clonezilla for many years making system backup images from 512-to-512 (bytes per sector) drives and never encountered that problem


This being said it is not a good idea to have a 360GB partition.

There are 4 partitions:

1) SYSTEM_DRV NTFS 1.46GB
2) Windows7_OS NTFS 49 GB
3) Data NTFS 230GB
4) Lenovo_Recovery NTFS 18GB


If all you have is one partition go for Windows 7 backup,

Are you sure that Win7 Backup works with Advanced Format 512e disks??

If you do partition you might want to consider another solution entirely, for example Macrium Reflect free. Windows 7 backup can end up wiping all your partitions when you restore if you don't pay attention to the options during the restore process.

So can Macrium, it happened to me. And I was paying very close attention to the options. It gave me no warning, and wiped out my data partition.

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cyanna said:

1. THE RED TEXT IS SUPER ANNOYING!

Sorry about that

2. You can't back up a 360GB drive on a 3GB backup drive

That was obviously a typo. It's a 3TB drive.

3. Good for you re clonezilla, I expect you have your answer.....

No, I don't have the answer to the question I asked, which involves a 512e drive. All my experience with Clonezilla has been with 512 physical sector drives.

4. W7 backup of 512e drives: yep. See HERE

Well we all know we can trust Microsoft, right? I went ahead and made a system image with Win7 on the 1000GB USB drive. Then I tried to restore from it... and Win7 could not find the image it had just made.

5. If it happened with Macrium then definitely don't go for win 7 backup

What's the connection?

cyanna said:

W7 can't find the image or the USB hard drive?

Can't find the USB drive. The same one it had no problem finding when it made the system image.

cyanna said:

How were you trying to restore: from within windows? Booting from recovery CD? Booting from W7 DVD?

Boot from "Win7 64bit System Repair Disk" that I made using Win7 on the same machine.

Question for Clonezilla users:

I have a laptop with 64bit Win7 Pro SP1 pre-installed on a 512e drive (4096 byte physical sectors, 512 logical sectors).

I have a 1000GB USB2 external drive with 512 byte physical sectors.

I have a Clonezilla 2.2.3-25-i686-pae boot CD.

Using the laptop as the source and the USB drive as the destination, I want to create a backup image of the system partition.

Then using the USB drive as the source and the laptop as the destination, I want to restore that system partition image.

Please share your experience if you have used Clonezilla to do this.

TL;DR:
backup system partition on 512e drive to image on 512 drive, then
restore image on 512 drive to system partition on 512e drive

Thank you.

cyanna said:

If you have not renamed or moved or added to the folder and two files created by Windows backup, make sure the USB drive is not plugged in a USB3 port. Windows has drivers for USB3 but the system repair disc doesn't.

I have not renamed or moved or added to the folder or files that Windows created.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like you are telling me that Windows created a System Repair Disk that will not work on the very computer on which it was created.

Either that, or you are saying that my brand-new laptop has both USB3 and USB2 ports. In which case, how do I tell which is which?