Solved Trying to reinstall from system image backup to a new drive, help.

[ineuw]

Be that as it may, my Sandisk 120GB SSD crashed today, with Win 7 Pro along with my dual boot setup for Xubuntu. It is the 2nd time this happened within the past four months. The first drive was a 120GB Patriot, which was replaced by the manufacturer, then donated it to a nephew. Now it's the Sandisk. I have three working system image backups, the most recent is from last night, each saved on a different drive so working backups are not an issue, nor is disk space.

I need a knowledgeable reply if there is a way to restore a mirror taken from one disk drive and restore it to another? My experience when the last drive crashed that the MS system restore will not restore it to a different drive. Subsequent research indicated that the mirror is limited to restore to the drive with the same UUID, but I could be wrong.

 

[RolandJS]

"...you can download AOMEI Backupper Professional; If server, AOMEI Backupper Server will help you to protect them.
With powerful features, backup, restore, clone can be done for data protection. Besides, by system clone function, it is easy to migrate OS to another hard drive or copy/clone system partition data, which avoid reinstalling system when hard disk updating and also protect system data..."
above snippit from: How to Transfer Operating System to Another Hard Drive?

I have never done such a clone restore, and have not used their software; I cannot vet the above information.
Perhaps others in here will post their experiences with AOMEI Backupper Professional; I do not know if the free
version will even touch the above-mentioned project, again, perhaps others here will post.

 

[ineuw]

Thanks for the the info, but this solution doesn't apply. There drive to clone from has crashed and I only have Windows system images.

 

[SIW2]

You can apply that system image to another drive.

METHOD 1 -only if new drive is same size or bigger than original

a) Use command prompt from booted winpe to apply image ( type wbadmin ? for help )

b) After applying the image, fix the drive letter. (Must fix drive letter before trying to boot into restored drive).

Tool to fix letter ( can be run from winpe )

View attachment NT6REP.zip




METHOD 2 - also works if new drive is smaller than original ( but larger than the used space in the image)

a) Mount the vhd in disk management

b) Make an image of the mounted drive with 3rd party program - Aomei will be fine.(free/standard version will do )

c) Restore the Aomei image.

Data Backup and Restore Software for PC and Server - AOMEI Backupper

 

[ineuw]

Thanks for the all the help. Tough to reply using a cellphone. Easy to change drive letter with minitools disk manager. Typing this takes longer than to reinstall.

 

[SIW2]

You can't do it with a partition manager. The volume value related to the OS drive letter needs to be fixed. That is why I made the tool to do it.

 

[ineuw]

SIW2, got it and thanks for the instructions.

 

[ineuw]

RolandJS and SIW2 thanks for the valuable links. Both Macrium and AOMEI are great system mirror tools. Installed both and created their versions of rescue disks, but I am going with AOEMI because it's faster. I had to do a restore once when the mirror was made with Macrium it was easy, and no problems.