windows 7 sp1 recovery using a system image from an external drive

Question

I had done a full backup ( system image included ) from old hard drive to Seagate 1TS backup plus. Bought new harddrive from Dell and installed it in My Dell Studio 1749 laptop. I had Used Windows 7 SP1 64-bit operating system disk to install Windows on new hard drive. Used 'standard' Windows 7 restore process steps, but got "the recovery operation failed" message. Detail of re-image your computer options message:

"to restore this computer Windows needs to format the drive that the Windows Recovery
 Environment is currently running on. to continue with the restore, shut down this
 computer and boot it from a Windows installer disc or system repair disc and try the restore
 again."

tried* and then got the "recovery operation failed" message * I say tried because I did not actually boot it from the Windows installer disc or the system repair disc that. As noted I had just used the Windows installer disc in setting the new drive up for the first time. So perhaps this is my mistake, as I am not quite sure how to 'boot from the Windows installer disc'.

Any help on this is much appreciated , as the purpose of buying the new Seagate and the new drive was to be able to transfer everything from the old drive to the new. Bill

Answer 1

The recovery operation probably failed because you did the fullbackup restore with another Windows 7 Disk rather than the Windows 'System Recover Disk' you supposedly 'create' from your old system. I already seen this happening. (32bit versus 64bit version issues can also create this problem)

Now if your 'old' Windows installation was corrupt there's a good chance your fullbackup restore is also corrupted if not than the fullbackup is just corrupted and doesn't work. I don't know if theres an option/way to verify the integrity of your backup.

My Suggestions for your issue if you didn't format your 'oldsystem drive' is either:

1) Backup your file and settings manually to the new 'backupdrive' with the help of Windows Easy Transfer

2) If what you want to do is fully restore you old windows operating system 'as it was'

I recommend using partition and disk imaging/cloning programs like:

CLONEZILLA (Free Open source)

NORTON GHOST (Non-free)

ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE (Non-free)

With one of these application clone your old partition or the entire disk to your 'backupdrive' and then restore it to you 'new laptop disk'. They are well documented and I personally use them all according to the operation needed.

Hopes this helps.