Restoring system image from a second internal HD

My internal 500GB HD feels like it's about to die ("one of your disks needs to be checked for consistency" msg at startup, but it still loads Windows 7), so I'm going to buy a new HD.

I've got two system images from last year:

- 1st image (earlier) was created on an external HD (500GB)
- 2nd image (later) was created on a second internal HD (1TB)

I would prefer to use the later image on the second internal HD.

Q1) When I boot off my win 7 DVD to get to the recovery page, which image will it offer me first? Will it offer me image on internal HD first with option to choose another location? I've read of people having problems recovering an image to a new drive when there are 2 internal drives.

Q2) If I replace internal 500GB drive with a 1TB internal drive, can I create a system image of that 1TB drive on an external 500BG drive?

Welcome to the forum. The message is not normally a HD fault it's a file system fault which Windows check disk will fix you can get test software from the disk makers website to check for the errors . You don't say what you used to create the image Windows or an imaging software. Your best option for new HD is clone the old drive to the new one. If you could compress an image from clone software you can create a lot of images to external drive

I'm going to try chkdsk like you suggest.

I've been reading Disk Check to familiarise myself, so it will be a few hours before I will see if it works (I hope it does).

FIXED ... (sort of)

I did chkdsk C: /F from elevated command prompt, restarted computer, chkdsk started.

I went away thinking it was going to take hours, came back 20 minutes later and it was done, I was in Windows.

<EventData>
<Data>Checking file system on C: The type of the file system is NTFS. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue. Windows will now check the disk. CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)... Cleaning up instance tags for file 0x185f9. 296704 file records processed. File verification completed. 946 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. 0 EA records processed. 60 reparse records processed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)... 363656 index entries processed. Index verification completed. 0 unindexed files scanned. 0 unindexed files recovered. CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)... 296704 file SDs/SIDs processed. Cleaning up 1636 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9. Cleaning up 1636 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9. Cleaning up 1636 unused security descriptors. CHKDSK is compacting the security descriptor stream 33477 data files processed. CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal... 34131848 USN bytes processed. Usn Journal verification completed. CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table (MFT) bitmap. Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. 488282111 KB total disk space. 394422988 KB in 207948 files. 112964 KB in 33480 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 413019 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 93333140 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 122070527 total allocation units on disk. 23333285 allocation units available on disk. Internal Info: 00 87 04 00 1d af 03 00 8c 5f 06 00 00 00 00 00 ........._...... 67 03 00 00 3c 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 g...<........... 0e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 ................ Windows has finished checking your disk. Please wait while your computer restarts.</Data>
</EventData>

Restarted computer and I'm still getting the weird "Express Gate is not installed on your system or the installation is not complete ..." msg at start up (can't read msg, screen disappears quickly), but I'm no longer getting the "one of your disks needs to be checked for consistency" msg and windows starts normally without the need for any intervention from me.

So there's still a problem, I just don't know what it is.

UPDATE:

I went into BIOS and disabled Express Gate and I no longer get the Express Gate msg at startup, question is, how did it enable itself in the first place?

Forget about how you get this in the 1st place.

Do create a System Restore point, before doing any other things.

Then you can check, if you want to, as this may take times as you do not know where to search for.

Is there any more pop-up as mentioned in your 1st post.

If everything is fine, then do a disk-image &or backup your whole system.

This is to ensure should you run into problem, ex HDD failure, then you can restore.

The problem may be when you install & uninstall certain driver /programs, it did not do a good job.

Troubleshooting take times.