Windows system image wrong size

[1vincent]

Hello.

I have a thread running in the Devices and hardaware section about my pc having problems booting from cold start.
Anyhow i have nearly sorted it now as it was a faulty motherboard.
I put in a 2nd hand motherboard and used a sata 160gb hard drive with a 80gb ide drive. Installed windows 7 and then i went to try and restore sytem image using windows but when completed it was nothing like what was on my pc before it broke.
The image file in the windowsystemimage folder 31gb.
Anyhow while looking on here i found out about restoring broken image files using Macrium and tried that. When it goes to make an image it says the file is 18gb but on the vhd it has a size and free space are the same as 100 minus 31 equals 69(hope it makes sense) so i dont know where the 18gb file size comes from.
It looks to me the 18gb is a backup and not a full system image but it was in the windowssystemimage folder.
Any ideas very muck welcome.

 

[1vincent]

Hello.

I have tried to put my sytem image back using Macruim and following the tutorial on here but it kept saying something like couldn't find image or something like that.
I will try again later.
I still dont get the difference in the file sizes maybe when i done the image it went wrong and only saved the data and not a full system image.