restoring system image to failed hard drive

[y2ken]

It's possible that the image won't install to a 'raw' unformatted drive.

You can install it in another computer and use disk management to partition and format your new drive.

Or you can create a bootable CD/DVD to partition and format your new drive. 

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard [free]

You would need to create an AOMEI boot disk, boot to it, create a new partition, then format that partition as NTFS.

Or if you prefer you can do a factory new recovery with your HP Recovery Disks. Then as you suggested 'mount' your backup image and recover your files from it. *Windows says you can't recover individual files from an image but it can be done. This might be the easier/best option since you will have a nice clean Windows installation to work with on your new SSD. 

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[bikerider49]

I was able to get Windows to launch by changing the boot device to the repair CD but then it can't seem to find the system image even though it says it will use that for the backup.

[bikerider49]

I was able to get Windows to launch by changing the boot device to the repair CD but then it can't seem to find the system image even though it says it will use that for the backup.  For some reason it is saying the image is in "MyPassport (C:)"  Why it says "C" as in C drive I don't know.  It's in the Passport attached via a USB.

The message says "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found".  I don't get it.

Thoughts?

Thank you.

[Captain_WD]

What do you see when you start the installation wizard and choose the option to recover the OS from an image? A screenshot would be useful.

I would also check if that WD My Passport is working properly on another system. Running WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool should give you that answer.  Also check if you can access the data on the drive.

As y2ken suggested, you may need to pre-format the drive on another computer and then have success with restoring the image.

Captain_WD.

[bikerider49]

Thanks to you both.  There is a place to exclude the formatting of the destination drive, and it automatically excludes the Passport drive.  It just then gives you a paragraph covering possible things that could be going wrong.

Anyway, I gave up and used the Systerm Recovery DVDs that HP provided with the computer, and reinstalled the systems.  Doing Windows Updates now.  All I have to find out now is if I can restore the old system image to this new drive.  I know that would overwrite the newly installed original machine, but that's OK.  The other thing is I know there are ways of showing "VHD" I think it is so I can manually extract just the folders and files with documents and pictures, etc.

If either of you know if I can now restore the system image from the old failed drive to the new drive, I'd appreciate it.  Otherwise I can just try it, and now that the new drive has been formatted, see if it works.

Thanks again to both of you.  (Not sure how to take a screen shot when all I was using with system repair.)

[y2ken]

If I understand correctly; you recovered your system with the HP recovery disks and now you would like to overwrite that installation with the system image you created earlier. ?

OK, here's how:

1. Open Recovery by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Control Panel. In the search box, type recovery, and then click Recovery.

2. Click Advanced recovery methods.

3. Click Use a system image you created earlier to recover your computer, and then follow the steps.

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[bikerider49]

Trials and tribulations of working with computers.

I tried to do a system image restore as you suggested.  I got the following 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 again from a Windows installation disc or a system repair disc and then try the restore again.

If you don't have a system repair disc, you can create one now."

So not knowing if I should use the old repair disc, or the new and improved reinstalled recovery discs updated with 213 Windows updates, I created a new one.

Should I use the new one since it's current to what is on the system image which was made less than a month ago?

[y2ken]

Since you now have a new, clean, updated Windows installation I think the best course of action is to just recover your files from the image and be done with it.

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[bikerider49]

just find out a way of showing the VHD, I think it is, files and copy them from there?

[y2ken · Accepted solution]

The link in my previous reply tells you step by step how to recover your files from the .vhd system image.

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