I've been having a problem imaging/cloning my win7 system. This is what I'm doing.
1. Within winXP, I Image my main hard drive with drive snapshot. I have a winXP partition with a win7 .vhd there also so I can dual boot into either system, works great!
2. After the image is done, I immediately restore that image to an eSATA drive so I don't have to boot from a recovery disk and then copy the image to a new hard drive. Why not do it now before a failure occurs.
3. I shut down, remove the sata cable from my main hard drive to simulate a failure, then reboot, go into bios to select the new eSATA drive with the image on it, then boot up.
4. Instead of getting my main dual boot selection screen, I get an error window with some info regarding the Win7 boot, some GUID showing, etc. This is occuring because the Win7 .vhd was the first in list to boot.
5. When I hit enter, the machine boots into winXP just fine. WinXP is the second on the boot list.
So what am I doing wrong? Why doesn't the Win7 boot? I think it has something to do with the bootstore but what?
Note when I restored the image to the eSATA drive I selected to restore partition sturcture and to restore disk signature. As soon as I do this the original main hard drive and the new one will have the same disk signature. This could be a problem at boot up but remember I disconnected the main HD at boot time so only one will HD will have that signature.
Anything come to mind? Are most guys booting with recovery media to restore??
