how to save windows 8.1 hard drive image before installing windows 7

[ron7000]

how to save windows 8.1 hard drive image

working on a dell laptop that came with windows 8. we did windows update and got it to 8.1 and it's been ok for past year. now it's very slow unresponsive. I don't have a spare hard drive to use so for the moment i'm stuck with using the oem 500gb drive that came with the laptop.
I would like to install windows 7 onto it, but i want to keep the recovery partitions and everything so that i have the option of going back to it.
i have the 500gb oem drive mounted on my other computer and see the following:
- 500mb efi system partition
- 40mb oem partition
- 490mb recovery partition
- OS 452GB primary partition
- 350mb recovery partition
- 11.6GB recovery partition


what's the best way, free way if possible, to save the entire contents of this 500gb oem drive?
thanks.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Most would tell you to try Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Or maybe Aomei Backupper.

You'd make an image file of those partitions. Either one image file for all of them or separate image files for each.

You'd save these image files on some other completely different hard drive and then later "restore" them if needed.

You'd need to make a "recovery disk" (aka "rescue disk") to boot from to do the restoration. Be sure to confirm it will in fact boot the PC.

Each image file will be a 100% representation of the entire contents of the partition(s) that were selected to be part of the image file---whether that be Windows files, configuration settings, licensing info, spaghetti sauce recipes, or pictures of your cat.

The image files are largely useless UNTIL they are restored.

It's "reliable", but not quite 100% reliable, so live with the possibility of failure.

There's a good Macrium tutorial on this site.

You could also use Macrium to make a "clone" of the drive, but that would tie up the cloned drive---you'd just put it in the closet in case. If you go the imaging route, you could continue to use the drive on which you stored the image files for any other purpose. And, anecdotally, imaging may be a bit less problematic.

 

[whs]

You can make a partition on the 500GB drive and place a Macrium image of all partitions there. An external disk would be preferable, but if you have none then this solution will have to do. If you tell me how much data you have on your C partition, then I can give you an estimate of how much space you will need for that partition.

Here is my Macrium tutorial that Ignatz referred to. But you have to make a new WinPE CD - the one I have uploaded does not support UEFI. When you download free Macrium, it will be accompanied by a partial WAIK file which you need for the creation for the WinPE CD.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I

 

[whs]

Btw - I assume that you know that installing a Windows 7 on a UEFI/GPT system is not as straight forward as on a BIOS/MBR system. You may want to consult this tutorial first.

Downgrade Windows 8 to Windows 7

 

[ron7000]

using my pc, a home built win7-64bit with 10 sata ports I plug-n-play hard drives to move data around.
instead of creating a restore disk my hope is to slave the laptop hard drive off my pc,
save contents of laptop drive to image file and save on my pc,
reformat laptop drive & install win7,
in future if i choose i'd like to slave laptop (or other) drive to my pc and manually recreate partitions,
then copy the saved win8 image files back to each partition on the drive.
is this doable or is there a catch i don't know about?
I realize with BIOS that the bootloader needs to be fixed when closing, but with EFI/UEFI is it as simple as copying the data back to the EFI FAT partition?

 

[whs]

An image you can only restore with a restore disc. Your scheme is Mickey Mouse.

 

[ron7000]

i've used Apricorn ez-gig in the past to do windows xp and 7 images many many times that way with 100% success, and that was under BIOS having a MBR, not EFI & GPT.
I use the same general procedure in linux where EFI is used, the boot partition is formatted as FAT32 having the linux kernel file. The second partition is the rest of the drive formatted as EXT3, EXT4, or XFS. For those 2 partitions it's a simple matter of slaving the drive on another system, doing a tar of the contents of each partition to a file called boot.tar (around 12mb it's just the kernel file) and root.tar (runs around 5GB in size). For any new drive i create the partitions however i with with the requirement that first partition is FAT32, and 2nd partition is same file system type (EXT# or XFS) as my saved root.tar file. Then just untar boot.tar and root.tar to the corresponding partition.

I'm hoping windows works the same way these days, on my pc i have an Asrock mobo set to UEFI however my hard drive is a dos partition table using MBR not GPT, but the first partition is 100MB NTFS (the boot partition ? ) followed by C: partition the remainder of the disk.
I will mickey mouse on a spare hard drive before i nuke that oem win8 laptop drive

 

[ignatzatsonic]

then copy the saved win8 image files back to each partition on the drive.

Image files aren't copied back. They are formally restored after booting from the recovery disk.

You can drill into an image file in an Explorer interface and copy individual files to some other location, but you need to formally restore the partition if you want to return a drive to its former state.

 

[whs]

So you have another hard drive. That makes thing a lot simpler.

The 100MB partition of Windows 7 is called system partition and contains the bootmgr. In EFI/GPT that is the EFI partition and it is in Fat32.

Go ahead and try your Mickey Mouse. What can you lose. Just make sure the recovery works.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

the one I have uploaded does not support UEFI.

Wolfgang: do you have intentions of updating your download to a UEFI-supported version?

 

[whs]

the one I have uploaded does not support UEFI.

Wolfgang: do you have intentions of updating your download to a UEFI-supported version?

I guess I should. I have the .iso file on my 8.1 systems. I'll put it on my calendar, LOL.

 

[whs]

Ignatz, the 5.3.7290 iso is uploading. That's the EFI one.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Ignatz, the 5.3.7290 iso is uploading. That's the EFI one.

Aye aye; I'll get it.

 

[ron7000]

then copy the saved win8 image files back to each partition on the drive.

Image files aren't copied back. They are formally restored after booting from the recovery disk.

You can drill into an image file in an Explorer interface and copy individual files to some other location, but you need to formally restore the partition if you want to return a drive to its former state.

what then is the "formal restore" process?
It confuses me that you say they can't be copied back. Isn't the image file created by copying the data of the partition in the first place, into some container file format that we call an image file? I guess i have a hard time not seeing data on the partition as just data. Like I said previously that's exactly how it works in linux and I can manually tar a whole partition into a single tar file... or zip file if i want to compress it, or into and iso file, and so on.
But i found a spare drive to mess around with, will see how it goes and who gets to say i told you so

 

[ron7000]

can someone quickly explain, or provide a link, about the windows 8 boot manager?
Is that similar to what grub or grub2 (grand unified boot loader) is in the linux world?
Forgot to mention, when i slaved the win8 laptop drive to my pc and booted my pc (which has a uefi motherboard) it booted the laptop drive, and my pc actually came up. i went into my pc uefi settings and disabled all the boot devices except for my win7 drive, and is when i noticed windows boot manager as a device all by itself. in my uefi settings i had my win7 drive set as #1 boot device, with dvd drive 2nd but it seems the windows boot manager of the laptop drive was good enough to trump my existing settings and make itself #1, which then caused the win8 laptop drive to boot.

 

[ron7000]

it worked, mostly.

so the original drive was a toshiba 500gb that came with laptop, the partition layout was this:
- 500mb FAT32 primary, 50mb used, label = ESP.
- 40mb FAT32 primary, 512 bytes used, label = DIAGS.
- 128mb unformatted primary, no label.
- 490mb NTFS primary, 283.6mb used, label = WINRETOOLS.
- 452gb NTFS primary, 108gb used, label = OS.
- 350mb NTFS primary, 304mb used, no label.
- 11.6GB NTFS primary, 11.0gb used, label = PBR IMAGE.

i used both macrium reflect 5.3 and aomei backup std 2.2.
for each program i saved one large image file, around 80gb each.
in both programs you open up the image file and it shows you the partition layout like i describe, with amount used in each.
my spare drive was a WD 320gb, so all partitions kept same size but i shrank the OS partition.
and in win7 disk manager i blanked the new 320gb drive, set it to GPT.
i used reflect first and i was able to create partitions #1..4 no problem on the new WD 320gb disk. from there things got crummy. it eventually let me move partition #5 the OS partition to the new disk but it only did so taking up the remainder of the disk; it didn't let me shrink it. so now my 320gb is partitioned taking up the entire disk, so in win7 disk manager i shrank that partition/volume down to 285gb, which left me with around 12gb unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. from here reflect would not let me copy the last 2 paritions (304mb & 11.0gb used) any which way i tried. so i went to aemoei; first I used the win7 disk manager to partition the remainder of the disk to 350mb then the remainder of the disk which was around 11.8gb. aomei let me restore those 2 partitions no problem. put the wd 320gb in the laptop, booted up and ran fine like nothing had happened. so far so good.

once logged in, tried to do recovery, either "refresh your pc without affecting your files" and "remove everything and reinstall windows".... could not find the recovery environment :haha:

so now i think it's a matter of figuring out how windows 8, and maybe dell, manage their recovery partitions. or is this where that rescue cd comes into play?