Restoring disk img (with macrium) after using dban to wipe hard drive

[RamyG4]

This isn't exactly a Windows 7 question, so if it doesn't belong here I apologize in advance.

Story: I had to send my laptop in to squaretrade for a repair (spilled liquid on the keyboard). They couldn't find the part, so they told me they were going to refund me the price of the computer (and not the price of the warranty), I quickly called and told them to send it back to me, which they did. Before sending it back, I took a disk image with macrium and wiped the hard drive clean with dban (after they had told me they would put Windows 7 back on my pc if I did so). When they sent it back to me they hadn't put windows back on the laptop. I could send it back to them to do so, but I was planning on buying the replacement keyboard (would get here in 2 days) and putting it back in myself, rather than waiting 2+ weeks to send it to them and have send it back.

Now, when I use the macrium recovery disk and I get to the part where it asks me to select which partition i want to overwrite the disk image data with, there's nothing there. Is there a way to remedy this?

 

[Cancerous]

Doesn't DBAN remove partitions?
Try booting up a GParted or PartedMagic disk and formatting the drive through that.

 

[RamyG4]

Ok thanks, is there a way to partition the drive exactly the way it was before?

 

[Cancerous]

Nope, but it's 99% likely that it was an NTFS format.

 

[whs]

I would make 1 partition over the whole drive. Later you can always shrink that partition if you want to make more partitions.

Alternatively you make a partition the size of the old C partition (or a tad bigger) - if you remember that size. The rest of the drive you leave unallocated for later use.

I would use Command Prompt which you have on any Windows installation or repair/restore disc. The commands are: (hit Enter after each command)

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given for your SSD in List disk)
Clean
Create partition primary
Format fs=ntfs quick
Active
Exit

And if you want a specific size, use this Create command:

Create partition primary size=50000

That would make a partition of 50GBs (the number has to be in MBs), if you wanted a 100GB partition, the number behind Size would be 100000

 

[RamyG4]

So the reason I couldn't find anything was because my laptop had no hard drive. I found this out when I received my hard drive in the mail from SquareTrade. Problem solved, embarrassingly.