Maintenance :: Using Windows 7 Image To Restore Certain Drive
Feb 23, 2013
I have 2 hard drives in my computer, my main Windows 8 C:, and a win7/game/data drive, the second of which is failing. reports show it is failing a smart short test, and although it has been running fine for months, i figured i would replace it with my tax return.
My question: If i create a system image of C: and D:, would it be possible to just restore the D: portion of the image, or do I have to restore both, then delete the second C: on the new drive? i do not have the resources or courage to test this on my system now because I am not sure what this reformat, and with my luck, the drive would die during the restore.
I have a Lenovo G585 laptop that I installed with Linux (tried dual boot) and accidentally wiped out the Windows 8.1 restore partition. Now I want to restore it to Windows. I also have a Dell desktop Windows 8.1 that I can use to to create a USB restore image, can I use a restore image from a desktop to fix a laptop?
I know there is good software out there to clone/image my hard drive and restore it to a new SSD drive. I'm just wondering though, since my laptop is brand new, I made a full recovery to a USB drive and included the OEM recovery partition.
Couldn't I just swap out the old HDD with the new SSD and boot with the recovery stick and do a full recovery back to the new SSD?
Also, however I do this, recover or image backup/restore, do I need to do some type of SSD alignment? I can't find a clear answer on that.
I've been dual-booting Windows 8 Pro and Windows 7 Ultimate, but a while back my Windows 8 kind of went "South" and wouldn't boot at all (I got an error message that a device was "not attached"). I have a recent system image on an external USB hard drive, but when I boot to "system recovery" using my repair disk it can't seem to find my USB drive at all.
The tutorials here mention installing a SATA driver to access disks that are not recognized, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
I made a system image from Windows 8.1 using Windows' own system image feature. I seem to be unable to restore it. I booted with the Windows 8 disc, and told it to restore from a system image. It found the image, ran a few minutes, then failed because of version mismatch (?). Not before hosing the entire system, by the way. Luckily, I was well backed up.
I booted with the Windows 7 disc, and it didn't even see the system image (on my external HD). It saw my Windows 7 system image and restored it just fine, and here I am.
Anyway, is there some trick to restoring a Windows 8.1 system image? I am not running Windows 8.1, so I can't generate a repair disk that way. Is there one available online somewhere for download?
I am thinking of installing a new hard drive to my Dell XPS 8500 (replacing the one that came with my system).
I have made DVD's that will install the factory image using Dell backup. If I install a new hard drive can I use these DVD's to install Windows 8 (the factory image) to my new hard drive?
My windows 8 pro install messed up n i have almost 2.8tb of stuff on my drive on a 3tb hd. I have an identical hd as a backup which i have (an apparently successful) a backup of my system from a couple of weeks ago on. I had set the system to do scheduled backups of the system (set to backup a system image of efi partition and c. There were a few times where i was trying to get other things done and the systemwas running slow so i cancelled the backups when i noticed them running. The software stopped the backups (seemingly successfully).
As i say my system messed up - i came home to find out it was no longer downloading (as i had left it doing when i went to work) but was on a blue screen (bsod?) saying the system needs to be restarted. Since then it didnt work well at all and after dskchk reported that several sectors were damaged so it was moving data to spare sectors (or whatever it generally reports when this happens) there were a lot of files messed up or reported as deleted when doing a file recovery scan with recuvva.
So i decided to restore the backed up system image from the other hd. Incidentally i tried mounting the vhdx backup image from that hd via windows explorer which then reported "the disk needs formatting" and didnt get any success mounting via disk management either (it mounted in the app but didnt show up on windows explorer and if i tried to access info on it via disk management it reported the same"disk needs formatting prompt".
So when i booted my win 8 dvd it didnt work cos the dvd wasnt an efi booting version so i had to boot from a usb version with the efi bit included.
I formatted the system drive and chose to do an image restore. It started doing the restore (apparently) but every time i came back to it later i had the follwing error:
"Re-image your computer
The system image restore failed.
Error details: The requested system device cannot be identified due to multiple indistinguishable devices potentially matching the identification criteria Ox80073B92"
It took me so long to set up my system n i have a lot of my own data on there too. The system drive I formatted was created in diskpart and then re formatted with "format" command (as it created the disk in raw mode) so now it is ntfs mode (uncompressed).
I have created two disk images. I deleted the first one but in the restore point pop up the title is still here (but is empty!!! The red one.) How can delete it????
I can't get windows 8.1 system image to burn to my backup drive it says access denied for some reason or another, and i can't get it to burn to dvd-r ether. I want to do a image of my drive.
I just installed Windows 8.1 on my system (from Windows 8) and had to restore to an earlier time (to one from earlier today). The issue is that my solid state hard drive was reduced by about 20 Gigs! I even deleted the other restore points and rebooted, but my hard drive has about 136 gigs of space. Before the restore, it was 156.
Does windows restore really eat up this much hard drive space? Is there a way to get it back?
Recently i upgraded my system to windows 8..N after clean install i backed up the copy of my C drive (Includes System Image) to my external 2TB Hard Drive.. It took around 250GB of hard drive space..Now since i am running out of space i decided to delete the back up copy from My hard drive.. I deleted WindowsImageBackup and all associated files using control panel..But around 150GB space is missing(not visible) from my external Hard Drive..
As You can see from attached pic that 125 GB free out of 1.81TB..But size of all files including hidden files is 1.53TB..
I have been routinely backuping my OS and important files using Windows 7 backup on a NAS. It just so happened that I needed to re-image my OS drive and I got into the Windows 8 recovery boot sequence.
Under the Advanced tools I selected the System Image Recovery and tried to look for the system image on the network path. Although the prompt said it was connecting to the network , the network share was not found. the command prompt couldn't ping google.com and netsh wlan <SSID> command did not work in hopes of connecting to my local wifi.
Is there a way to connect to the wifi network where my NAS is connected to in order to re-image from the system image found on the NAS? Luckily , there was an older image on a separate local HDD that I could re-image from but I would prefer if I could connect to the NAS during the recovery process.
I was trying to install Kali linux as a partition on my windows 8, and was using EasyBCD to add Kali linux to the boot entry. Somehow I ended up deleting the Windows 8 boot entry, not deleting the Windows 8 drive but deleting the boot entry meaning I can't boot into it. I have tried MANY MANY MANY solutions to fix it. I've tried using a recovery disk but that just shows the windows logo and reboots and reboots and does the same stuff.
Eventually I just gave up and thought I'm just gonna get rid of this windows 8 which by the way came pre-install with my Toshiba L855-149, and just install windows 7. Of course I NEEDED my files so just an hour ago, I removed the hard drive from the laptop, put it into HDD Docking thing I have which allows me to add the hard drive as an external drive to my other win7 desktop PC. I started copying all my files which I am still doing now. I was thinking is there a way to make some sort of restore point from the hard drive or something? Is there another way to boot up windows 8?
If I create a custom refresh image such as a blank retail windows 8 will it restore my files. I'm trying to go from wim 8.1 pro wmc to pro because it is not activated and I have a pro product key. Is there any way to downgrade without losing files settings etc.
What i mean is can I reinstall windows 8 pro (I currently have media center) without losing eveything?
On my friend's Dell Inspiron laptop, Windows 8 will not boot. I want to boot to the repair disk to restore an image I had created. F12 on boot does not show the DVD drive as an option. I went into Setup/Boot and disabled Secure Boot, still did not show the DVD as a boot option. I went back to Setup and selected Boot List Option>Legacy. Now it shows the DVD drive as an option to boot. I booted the repair dis, went through all the dialogs to select the image I had created, but when it goes to restore it it says it cannot because the image was made in UEFI, and it is now set for BIOS.
I went back into Setup/Boot and I see that the option Load Legacy Option ROM is now Enabled, it did it on its own. As a test I set it back to the defaults and re did it as above, and again it automatically changes Load Legacy Option ROM, which I assume is what is creating the problem.
So my question is what do I need to do to boot from the Windows Repair Disk?
I have a XPS 8500 with preinstalled windows 8. I tried to install Ubuntu 12.10 on it. When I partitioned the disk, I accidentally format the whole disk. Then I could not restart to Windows 8. I didn't make any backup or recovery media. How to restore factory image?
I have 10 computers with identical hardware that all have their own oem license. What I want is to have the same setup on all 10 computers. What I remember from previous Windows versions is that you had to activate Windows individually with its own oem key for every computer you restored with a preferred disk image. From what I read the product key procedure is a bit different in Windows 8 and that the key is stored in the bios? The activation should also be handled automatically by Windows, is that correct?
So what I really wonder is: Do I still have to activate every restored pc manually or will Windos 8 do this for me?
A second related question: Are there any imaging/cloning software that can be set up to promt me for a new computer name in the restore process?
Although I have been able to make a full disk image using the built in "system image" option, I can not find any way to restore it. The recovery options only point to system restore and refresh PC. I'm navigating to <control panel> and then <file history> to access the recovery options. I can not find any restore from system image option anywhere.
Am I missing something, or is it deliberately missing in the Enterprise editions ? If so is there any way I can restore the backup image ?
I have two hard disks, and I have a system image that I made of the OS, it is stored on the second disk, the one without the OS. Both disks have sharing turned off.
What happens if I can't boot into Windows, and I want to use EaseUS backup to restore my system? Will I be able to access the system image, if I boot from the EaseUS live CD? Or will I be denied access, because it is not a shared disk?
And generally speaking, is it advisable to have sharing turned off, or on? I am not on a network, but I have several user accounts on the same OS. What security settings are good for my situation.
Okay, experience is the best tutor. I booted from the CD to see what would happen, and yes, it can read the system image file off of the hard disk. But I would still like to know what are the security settings for sharing etc.
I use O&O Disk Image 7.2 to make images of my Windows 8 drive. Occasionally I need to mount an image to access folders and files. One folder I can't access is my user folder. I get the message 'You don't currently have permission to access this folder.' I took ownership of the folder but that didn't work. I get a similar result for the folder "C:WindowsCSC" if you want to see how my user folder behaves.
How can I access my user folder on my mounted image?
I had a windows 7 laptop which finally died but before it did a made a system image backup to my external hard drive so I have all the files. How do I load that onto my new windows 8.1 laptop so I have all my files there?
I was trying to locate some files in my user folders in Windows 8 I was looking for the app data files to restore my email from an old version to a new clean install of the client. I could not find the folder although I knew it existed as this is where the app is storing my email, so I figured it was hidden. I started to look for the setting I knew in 7 that would allow you to see hidden files when you ran the folder properties. The only thing I saw anywhere about hidden files was on the first page of the properties where it says read only and hidden so I checked the box and told it to apply. (I know, stupid thing to do since I did not understand what it was doing. This is so unlike me) Now I do not have any user folders and not much works. How can I restore my user files?
I bought an Acer notebook with Windows 8 SL (Single Language) and UEFI BIOS (with Secure Boot) factory installed (Windows Key is set in Bios).
I have the habit of installing all programs and make an image of partition C: in case of having to reinstall the entire system for problems with Windows, HDD exchange or similar cases. With this gain too long and not have to reinstall all the programs one by one.
My HDD is partitioned into 4 parts: C:, E:, F: and G:.
When I enter the Windows 8 app to generate the system image appear two partitions pre-marked for backup: C: (Programs) and EFI System Partition (no drive letter). C: partition is formatted as NTFS, but the EFI is as FAT32.
My question is: when I restore this, how should I format the partition where you install the system again (C ? Format all the partition as NTFS and Backup app creates the EFI partition FAT32 by own?
How it works and how to proceed? I will boot the system by CD-ROM.
Its my first time to create my first system image in my windows 8. Can I exclude a certain file if not how many blank cd's do I need I got 146GB used currently in my C drive and while creating a system image could it take the process an hour or more?
