cannot find way to restore from VHD image on external hard drive

[Nellyho]

Hello, Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer. I will do my best to describe what I find to be a confusing scenario. Our Windows 7 laptop became infected with a virus last August. It prevented me from booting the computer. We back up to a 930 gb "My Book" external hard drive. It appears we use WD Smartdrive as a back up facilitator. (Not sure what the program does, but without any effort on our part we have a lot of data, including VHD images, backed up on the external hard drive.) I finally had to re format and reload Windows thinking it would be easy to restore from the back up hard drive. When I reloaded windows I must have named the computer "homeofficelaptop". The previous name must have been "officelaptop". After reloading windows I tried to restore using the backup hard drive, it was not as user friendly as I thought it would be. I ended up just copying and pasting files from the external to the c: drive. Now I want to do it right and restore from a VHD image on the backup drive. Windows is not seeing the backup image I need to use. It only sees an image that was created since I restored. The backup drive has a "WindowsImagebackup" folder containing subfolders "homeofficelaptop" and "officelaptop". The VHD file I want to restore is in "officelaptop". Windows only recognizes "homeofficelaptop". I've tried changing the name of the computer back to "officelaptop" but it is not helping. Windows restore function does not let me search and pick which VHD to restore from. How can I make it do that or what else can I do to restore from the older, pre-virus, pre-recovery image? There is lots more I could say and attempts I've made but maybe this is enough. Thanks for whatever advice you can offer.

 

[Brink]

Hello Nelly, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You might see if you may be able to restore the System Image VHD using the method in the tutorial below.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/210195-system-image-recover-broken-windows-7-system-image.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Kari]

Just a thought:

All my external HDDs are from WD and although I do not use WD SmartWare as my backup solution at the moment, I have played with it quite a lot. As I remember, I have never had any issues in recognizing WDs own backup images with WDs own software.

Check if your WD drive has the WD SmartWare setup files, they should be found in WD SmartWare folder. If yes, run the correct setup file on your laptop when the WD drive is connected, WD SmartWare Setup (x86).exe if you have a 32 bit system and WD SmartWare Setup (x64).exe for a 64 system. If you are not able to find WD SmartWare setup files, you can download the latest version.

When done, open WD SmartWare program and click Retrieve tab, it should now find its own disk images which can then be restored.

Kari

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