Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

Hello Palustris,

Since it's a new machine I would have the hard drive checked in your computer to be safe. You can usually go to the hard drive manufacturer's website to download a utility to check the hard drive as well. In addition to that one, here are 7 free ones that you can use if you can't find one from the manufacturer.

If you are able to repair the corrupt sectors, then you should create another system image backup to replace the other one.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Ok. Please let us know how the results turn out. :)

well it actually happened.
My dell vostro 1500 laptop running windows 7 home premium as an upgrade to vista hd died 3 days ago.
I had followed your instructions here in Jan to make a system recovery disk and image to my wd external hd.

Since i have a service contract with dell they shippped me another hd.

I prayed once i put the HD in, changed the boot order to the cd rom and booted to the system recovery dvd that i had created Jan 15 2010. Plugged into the usb the external hd that had the image.
I followed your tutorial and within an hour it had restored everything correctly to the new hd.

This is a live saver because i would have had to reinstall vista sp1 then upgrade to windows 7 again.

Thank you so much for putting this tutorial in.

Once I know all is fine, i will do another system image at the end of this month because the only thing i had to update was the feb security updates.

robin

Hello Robin,

I hope all goes well and smooth for you. Please let us know how it went for you.

Hello Lecva, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Sorry, but a system image backup is a clone of the selected drives and partitions. When you restore it, it replaces what you currently have with the backup image. Because of this, you will not be able to restore your Ultimate image backup into the Professional installation using the normal system image recovery methods.


You can manually copy the files you want from the Ultimate installation into the Professional one though with one of these two options below.

1) Do a custom install of Professional to have all of the files from your current Ultimate installation saved into the C:\Windows.old folder in the new Professional installation, then restore from the C:\Windows.old folder. (easiest method)

2) Extract the files you want from the Ultimate system image backup file, and copy them into the Professional installation when it is through installing.

Hope this helps,
Shawn