System Image Recovery

DANG! It was all there in black and pink....

"A system image recovery will format EVERYTHING on your hard drive and restore
ONLY what is included in the system image backup."

Yup! I tried and now i'm tired.
And so i bid adieu to Windows Imaging till they come out with Version 2.
Windows Imaging is a DISK imaging program, not a PARTITION imaging program.
It will IMAGE a partition, but will only RESTORE to an entire disk.
The 'exclude disk' parameter excludes OTHER disks on the system. If you
chose to exclude THE disk that contains partitions beside THE one you imaged,
then Windows Imaging halts with a prompt that says 'get a life ditz'.
For OBVIOUSLY you can't exclude the disk you wish to restore the particular
partition to. DUH me!!!

Partimaging is such sweet sorrow :(
Back to the future....Linux and PING and Windows Dream.

catherine said:

DANG! It was all there in black and pink....

"A system image recovery will format EVERYTHING on your hard drive and restore
ONLY what is included in the system image backup."

Did you get this message because you had checked the "Format and repartition disks" option?

I don't think that is an option.

It is a warning. I assume if you click No - then it won't do the restore.

http://www.shivaranjan.com/shivauplo...temimage10.png

It is asking if you want to continue. It is not asking if you want to restore without formatting the entire Disk.

Catherine appears to be right.

Much better to use a 3rd party app. - there are some great free ones.

Hi there,

after I spent hours because of wrong descriptions, and forum threads, and moved my 1TB data to an other disc (partition D: ), and let Windows 7 to restore my system (from the system image, which was created of the partition C: ), the partition whit all the data hasn't been changed!

Thanks! Why just they wrote disc will be formated, and NOT partition?

So, if you have C: and D: on the same HDD, but your system image is on a 2nd HDD, than you don't need to backup D: --if you trust Microsoft--, because if you have only C: in the system image, as backup, it won't harm D: with all of your data(!).

It took me ~ 3 hours to backup all my data, but I have moved the whole big files, and after Windows didn't formated the whole HDD, only the first partition!!!

Now it will cost me an other 3 hour to copy them back.
Nice! isn't it?

catherine said:

DANG! It was all there in black and pink....

"A system image recovery will format EVERYTHING on your hard drive and restore
ONLY what is included in the system image backup."

Yup! I tried and now i'm tired.
And so i bid adieu to Windows Imaging till they come out with Version 2.
Windows Imaging is a DISK imaging program, not a PARTITION imaging program.
It will IMAGE a partition, but will only RESTORE to an entire disk.
The 'exclude disk' parameter excludes OTHER disks on the system. If you
chose to exclude THE disk that contains partitions beside THE one you imaged,
then Windows Imaging halts with a prompt that says 'get a life ditz'.
For OBVIOUSLY you can't exclude the disk you wish to restore the particular
partition to. DUH me!!!

Partimaging is such sweet sorrow
Back to the future....Linux and PING and Windows Dream.

I was reading on this website The Storage Team at Microsoft - File Cabinet Blog : Learn more about system image backup

and it quoted "Create a new image after a disk layout change ­– During system image recovery, the UI will check if the current layout on the disk matches the layout information captured in the backup. If it matches, then it will allow restoring only the data in the critical partitions without formatting and recreating partitions on the entire disk. However if the layout has been changed, then it will need to recreate the partitions using information from the backup, which means formatting the entire disk and potentially deleting any non-critical partitions and their data. Therefore it’s recommended that if you ever change the disk layout on your computer, you should create a new system image to allow for a more flexible recovery experience. "

So was your layout different from the image to the restore? If not it says it should not do that.

I am very interested as my main drive has 3 partitions on it (system C and two data drives E & F) and I only want to image the Main system partition to another independent drive.
And if I restore just that partition I only want that system partition to be formated and restored leaving the other two data partitions not changed and untouched.

Will Win 7 Restore Image also restore my Office 2k7 software (Binaries and Data) that are on my HDD(s) without having to reinstall Office 2k7? And can I use the image to restore to a different machine (same mobo / disk arrangement)?

Thanks Shawn -

I'll have to give it a try (restore Image to the same computer (comp-a).

As far as using the Windows 7 Image to restore from an Image taken on (comp-a) to a different computer (comp-b) I think I'll have a code key issue.

Since the chipid on (comp-b) will be different from the Image taken from (comp-a), I'll probably have to use the original code key as (comp-b) had in the first place and re-activate.

Thoughts?