win 7 image restore

[westentertainer]

hi i was dual booting vista and win 7 but i had a problem when the pc would not boot ,i tried everything and eventually had to remove the 1 tb hdd that had win 7 on,so now i have vista on a 160 gig ,my question is i have a back up of my win 7 on an external hdd ,if i reformat the 1 tb hdd with win 7 on can i then somehow copy the image from the external drive on to the 1 tb many thanks in advance

 

[electrotune1200]

Yep, you sure can, just make sure you burn a System Recovery Disc from within Windows 7. If you can't, you can just use your Install disc.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/675-system-image-recovery.html?filter[2]=Backup Restore

In your case, you can start from step 3.

 

[electrotune1200]

Did you use the inbuilt Windows 7 backup & restore to create your image, or another application?

If you used Windows, the above post applies.

 

[gregrocker]

The best method to boot separate HD's is to set one first to boot in BIOS Boot Order, then to boot the other use the one-time BIOS Boot Menu key which on Asus' is F8, DEL or ESC. This keeps the HD's independent to come and go as you please.

To achieve this unplug XP HD, reimage Win7 HD, mark it's partition Active and run 3 Startup Repairs with reboots. Once WIn7 boots on its own, plug back in XP to boot it when needed via the one-time BIOS Boot Menu key.

Perhaps we can help get your old Win7 started: Plug its HD back in and set it first to boot in BIOS setup, unplug the Vista HD, boot the WIn7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD Command Line to use Diskpart to make sure Win7 or it's 100mb System Resesrved partition (preferred) is marked Active per this tutorial, then run http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html. Post back results.