Really Bill?

[Mike2468]

I am not much of a techey person, but I recently attempted to be one. I bought a NAS, mirroring 2TB drives for a central location for important stuff so my laptop, my wife's laptop, and my desktop can all point to when we need to get to documents. I set up all of our computers to backup to the NAS, which they do on a weekly basis. They all have full images on the NAS. I didn't want to have to spend hours reinstalling software when drives would fail.

The day came when my OCZ 60GB Agility SSD crashed. I received a new one (exactly the same model and size) and I was feeling good that a full image backup was created only about a week before it crashed. I installed the new drive, and put in the restore disc. No hard drive was found. OK, so I took the drive to my desktop and put it on the SATA doc and did a quick format. I returned it back into my laptop, inserted the restore CD, and I attempted to restore from the network. I entered my NAS IP, and folder that the WindowsImageBackup folder was located on, but it wanted credentials for a drive that did not require any. I tried a few things, but nothing worked. I copied the entire folder to a NTFS USB drive. I tried again, but it did not see an image even though it can be seen by installing drivers and opening up my computer in the re image GUI. I then tried to put in on my desktop in a shared folder. I tried the network again, entered the user/password, but nothing. The image is 39GB and contains no documents, only software such as Office 2007, Web Expressions Studio, Anti-Virus, Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010, plus many updates, mapped drives, settings, and other software that takes a very long time to install. I have spent the past 7 hours researching and trying different ways to reimage, but it will not acknowledge an image. I tried to reintsll Windows 7 and go from the control panal, but that did not make a difference. Am I missing something?

 

[Wishmaster]

The was a full system image made with Windows 7 Imaging tool?

TBH, Im not sure how to get it to recognize the image for a restore.
I have tried Win7s Imaging tool, and had several issues with myself trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
Perhaps others with knowledge of it can help more.

Unless it has something to do with file permissions.



If you've already installed a fresh copy of Windows, something you may want to try, if all else fails:

Give Acronis a shot.

The reason I suggest it, is because it is capable of converting a Windows Backup into an Acronis one.
If its able to, you should be able to launch a restore right from Windows.

Sadly, Acronis is a Paid program. But it does offer a 30day trial.
You will not be able to restore from a boot disc with the trial, but you can from Windows.


many may disagree but ..

I do think your best best will be to switch over to something like Macrium Reflect or Acronis for future imaging.

I really like Acronis, because it just works as I expect it too.
Macrium is free, and is highly recommended as well.

Either way, these 2 seem to be the most recommended and most reliable.

 

[Cr00zng]

Windows image backup creates a folder named "WindowsImageBackup" in the root of the backup device. If you run the system restore CD, the process will look in the root of the device for the image backup; it will not find the image if it is located in a folder on the backup device.

You can read more on the subject in this this tutorial...

 

[Mike2468]

I have tried placing the WindowsImageBackup folder on the root of the NAS and the USB drive, but no luck. I have tried the restore CD and I also tried to restore from Windows. I have seen this tutorial and it is what prompted me to try to install Windows and then try to re image. I do have 2 other images. One was created from Norton 360 and the other was another Windows image. The problem is that they are both old.

 

[Mike2468]

I was able to restore the old Windows Image just as is should which now makes me believe that somehow the latest one is currupted.

 

[alan10]

Both Macrium and Acronis are able to test their backups for validity.

If the backup is corrupted the checksums show the error to signify the problem,
and an attempt to restore will not get very far.

Does Windows not support validation of its backups ?

 

[SIW2]

The closest you can get is to mount the vhd in disk mgmt and see if everything looks.

If the Mike's image (vhd ) was corrupt - he should have got an error message to that effect.

Seems more likely the .vhd is OK - locating it was the issue.

If that is the case, the vhd can be mounted and an image made of it using a 3rd party app.

That 3rd party image should then restore fine.