Restoring Only WIN7 after Wiping Hard Drive

IPalm7 · 04 Dec 2017

Please forgive me, I'm sure that this has been covered in the past.

I have an ACER desktop that I'm going to give away. It has WIN7 Home Premium in a recovery partition but no program disks.

The hard drive is full of financial info so my plan was to do a system image and use DBAN to wipe the drive and then restore only WIN7 from the image. That did not work. After DBAN spent 12 hours on the drive, the "restored" image is everything I wanted off of it. I saw no option to just restore the operating system.

I have read that trying to move only WIN7 from its hidden partition may not work either.

I would appreciate any advice.

samuria · 04 Dec 2017

Welcome to the forum. Running dban would remove the ability to use the recovery if this is a MBR drive setting the recovery parition to active it should then reboot into the recovery

IPalm7 · 04 Dec 2017

Yes, I agree. DBAN has cleaned everything off the hard drive.
However, I made a drive image that totally restores the computer but that's not what I want.
I only want the WIN7 to be restored.

Barman58 · 04 Dec 2017

Only way I can think of doing what you wish is to manually delete all the data you do not wish to retain, shrink the partition to the size of the OS, then image the partition, clear the drive , restore the partition to the front of the drive and finally extend the partition to the full size of the drive

That should give you a system with a clean area where the data used to be but is i'm afraid rather complex

Layback Bear · 05 Dec 2017

Here is a tutorial by Kari that might be helpful.
Take a read.

Windows 7 Installation - Prepare PC to be Sold - Windows 7 Help Forums

Jack