Restoring Windows back up on my laptop

I have a 32gb SSD and a 750gb HDD on my Lenovo Ideapad that I'm trying to reinstall windows on, but I'm not
entirely sure how.

For reasons that I don't want to get into, I was forced to delete all partitions and reinstall Windows. Before doing so, I made a system backup image of my laptop and put that on an external drive. I went through the Windows installer and I seem to have somehow managed to accidentally install Windows 7 on both drives. This isn't really an issue in the grand scheme of things, but it may be a factor in my real problem.

After finally booting into a clean, untouched version of Windows, I tried restoring the previous form of my laptop by using the Recovery Control Panel. However, upon following the steps and selecting my external as the recovery source, I receive a nasty error message:

"The Windows Complete PC Restore operation failed.
Error details: The disk that is set as active in BIOS is too small to recover the original system disk. Replace the disk with a larger one and retry the restore operation. (0x80042407)"

I find this to be very strange, as this is the EXACT same drive. Surely this must be a bug. My disk is DEFINITELY large enough.

Are there any steps I may have missed? Is there anything I can do to troubleshoot the exact underlying cause? After all, the size of the drive clearly cannot be the problem.

Thank you for your time!

Is this one of those "hybrid" drives that has both an SSD portion and a standard spinning drive as part of a single unit?

Or do you in fact have 2 distinct and discrete hard drives?

I'd guess it's a hybrid and I'd guess that is the root of the problem.

Post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management showing all drives if you are able to boot at all.

I know it currently says that they're two separate disks, but when I received the laptop, they were on the same disk.

runfromtasers said:

After finally booting into a clean, untouched version of Windows, I tried restoring the previous form of my laptop by using the Recovery Control Panel.

I'm not up to speed on hybrid drives, so someone else will have to make suggestions.

Superficially, I'd guess that your attempt at restoring your old system image was targeted at the SSD portion, which is not large enough to hold whatever was in that image. The SSD is only about 30 GB. You must have used Windows Backup tool, which has its own ideas about what needs to be part of that backup, and it decided to include the spinning drive partition as well, making the overall backup too big to fit on the SSD. That's my wild guess.

But I'm wondering: you say "after finally booting into a clean untouched version of Windows"......why didn't you stop there, rather than trying to restore the old version"? Most would tell you that you are better off with a clean install anyway.

My laptop was running fine before and all my files are on the back up. What happened was I was trying to install Ubuntu but somehow the Windows 7 partition got corrupted. After that I was forced reinstall Windows.

The backup does seem to have backups of both the HDD and the SSD and I'm not entirely sure what I should do now.

If the only versions of my personal files were contained in a system image made by the Windows backup tool, I'd be nervous. Very nervous.

My first goal would be to get those personal files copied elsewhere in ordinary form---not inside an image. Never mind the restoration of Windows per se. That's easy enough--you've already done it when you did the clean install.

But, I avoid Windows Backup tool and know next to nothing about it. My guess is that you should be able to copy those files elsewhere by drilling into the image in some way, but I have no idea of the method. You can certainly do that easily enough with other imaging apps.

As a general proposition, I'd never rely on an image as a backup of anything. I use them, but don't rely on them. My data is never backed up only via image. They are a complication and suspect for that reason alone.

Oh no. I do have the actual files on an external as well. I would just rather have my original desktop setup back rather than going through the trouble of redownloading and installing everything.

Follow these steps for Install Windows on MSATA (SSD) Drive - Windows 7 Help Forums
or if you have IRST setting in BIOS use Install Windows on System with MSATA and ISRT - Windows 7 Help Forums