System Image Recovery

Hi,

As a newbie to this forum, I was hoping to get some help on this thread.

About 2 weeks ago, Win7 warned me that my OS Drive was about to fail (As acursed WD Caviar Black IT drive only 6 mths old) and suggested that I make an image back up of my OS om C: drive.

I did so on an external drive connected to my PC via USB cable. At this time, the failing drive could still run Win 7

A few days later when I purchased a new hard drive, I copied all the partions from the failing drive onto the new healthy drive. However, the C: partition which contained Win7 must have been corrupted on the bad drive and the copied Win7 would not boot from the new drive.

I deleted the bad C: partition and made a clean install of Win7 on the new HD hoping that I could restore the Win 7 image backup from the external USB drive.

However, when I connected the external drive tried the image recovery from Win7 control panel, Win7 could not find the saved image backup on the external drive.

How can I get Win7 to recognize the saved image and restore it?

Please advise and thanks.

desdevil said:

but that options doesn't make any changes my laptop still cant boot into windows.. erm i'm not sure wad type of harddisk mine is, but thats the only one i had in my laptop.

I don't know whose response you are referring to. The format option provided by the repair disk (not Windows) was your question. Inputs from 2 people are confusing you - I'll leave it to Brink.

Brink said:

Hello Bigfire, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Just to double check, is this what you did to create a system image backup?

Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup

Did you try step 6 in STEP TWO to see if you may be able to manually select the image backup from the external HDD?

If so, you might try step 3 in STEP TWO to see if you may be able to at boot instead of from within Windows.

In addition, you might also try a different USB port in case that may be the issue.

Thank you Brink for your help.

I tried retrieving the image as described in step 3 of STEP TWO, but Win7 still can't "see" the image on the external drive.

Could this be because the new Win7 install did not actually create the system image stored on the external drive?

I noticed that there is a command line option on the recovery console.

Is there a text command that can direct WIN 7 where to look for the image I want to recover?

Thanks again.

Bigfire

The post above should allow you to easily recover files.

However,
1) If you changed the name of the PC to say "JONES-PC" then the second folder in from "WindowsImageBackup" should also have that name (change if it hasn't).

2) I believe the command line actions still assumes the same folder structure as the GUI.
But it is -
wbadmin get versions -backupTarget:d:

here I search for an image on my d: partition and it finds it.


NOTE: When booting from the system repair DVD or install DVD the partition letters will generally change. Make sure you using the appropriate letter. In the example above it could be e:

Hi Bigfire, I am just a sometime observer here, and not one of the experts... that having been said, have you tried the most simple of things and booted from a recovery disc, or the original W7 disc, to do your recovery from there? Your post earlier seemed to suggest you were trying to to everything from a new W7 instal which, for my money, seems more difficult. I may have the wrong end of the stick, if so... but sometimes, even the experts can overlook the trivial.

Good luck.

Thank you for the suggestion

But, I've tried it from the Win7 installation disk with the same result.

My next step is to try restoring the image using a command line.