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I've created a system image on an external hard drive and I was hoping to restore from it. Problem is all the tutorials I've seen only explain how to restore from a CD/DVD, for example http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7702/restoring-windows-7-from-an-image-backup/

I have tried pressing F12 during start up and selecting External drives (which just seems to lead to the system booting as normal) and USB devices (which then says operating system not found).

Is it possible to restore from a HD and if so how do I go about this?

UPDATE

I followed the suggestion below to get to the Repair my computer screen but I get the message the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. My HD is formatted to ntfs. Could this be a problem? I swear this should be more straight forward...

3 Answers 3

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Sorry, the system image was stored to an external drive - which is not bootable. You can't start the computer from that drive in order to get access to the image file. When you created the image, did you make the system restore disk as well? You boot the computer from the system restore disk and then search for the image to restore from.

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you need to create a bootable usb image http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-usb-recovery-drive

is the standard way to do this, and if done as a recovery image it will have all your installs included. By default an image will not be bootable unless you choose to make it so.

it does not care about the size of the usb device, key or drive!

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When you are just about to start installing Windows, at the screen where you choose Install there should be an option that says "Repair My Computer". Click on the "Repair My Computer" link and that is how you access the part of the installer where you can restore from your system image on the external hard drive.

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  • Apologies about the delay in replying. I get the message the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. My HD is formatted to ntfs. Could this be a problem? I swear this should be more straight forward...
    – windowsgm
    Oct 22, 2013 at 22:14

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