Recover bootable Win 7 recovery drive from an image

Question

I have a laptop that came with a Windows 7/OEM license, for which I still have the product key. I have replaced this OS with another (Linux), and I'm trying to re-install the former. Here's the problem statement: I used to have a working USB recovery drive, but no longer have it. But in the interim, I made an image of it, on an external HDD, using gnome-disk-utility. It is named 'win-live.img'. That is all I have to restore Windows on my laptop. I tried recovering the recovery drive using the same utility, but it is not mountable, and it's not usable for booting. IS there any way I can recover win-live.img?

Answer 1

It's because you wrote the image to /dev/sdc1 instead of /dev/sdc. I don't know if gnome-disk-utility has a menu/button somewhere else for you to write an image to a drive instead of one of its partition. If you couldn't find such menu/button, you can do the right thing with cp:

# cp /path/to/win-live.img /dev/sdc

In my experience this is not necessary but as a reassurance, you can run:

# sync /dev/sdc

after the cp command returned, to flush the cached data (dirty pages) to the drive.

Make sure /dev/sdc still refers to the desired target drive before running the command though.