Restoring a Windows Image

Hey all. Earlier today/yesterday I had a HDD failure, bad sectors, system freeze ups etc etc, disaster. Managed to aquire another drive from an old mates machine I've got lying about.

Anyhow, I've got an image from around 2 weeks ago, on an external that I want to restore. I've never used the windows image recovery, and am running into some problems, so some help would be great!!

I've installed windows onto the newish drive, but I've not updated any of the drivers, updates, not installed any software as it's all on the image. So I go into windows backup and restore, recover system settings or your computer, advanced recovery methods, then go through the motions there until I have to restart. When I restart it tries to initiate the restore but fails, citing that I need to run the restore from a windows disk. No problem, pop my USB with W7 on, initiate the restore from there, and this is what I'm baffled about, maybe I'm doing something really simple wrong, but can't see where, it gives me an error message saying it needs to format the HDD that the backup is on, so cannot carry on the backup. Why, why does it need to wipe the drive the backup is on, wipe the existing C: in the laptop yes, but the one containing the backup, i'm not restoring that drive.

It seems to me that for some reason it is trying to restore the image onto the external, and I have no idea why, I don't select it when trying to restore, it gives me no option to select it. In fact it gives me no option on which drive to restore it to.

Any help would be great before I start banging head against wall very hard lol!!

 

I managed to get past the initial error, seems like there was a tiny amount of unpartitioned space on the external HDD, so i've merged it onto the existing partition with the backup on, and it seems to have remedied this problem, only to be confronted with another issue.

This time it's throwing up an error saying incorrect parameters, didn't manage to get the error code, but searching online can't seem to find a fix. Again, it's possibly 2 things, that my HDD isn't the same as the old one, i.e partitions replicated, or it's something to do with the USB drive.

I'm going to burn a windows repair disk this evening, and try running the restore from that, see if that gets me anywhere. I will not be defeated by this, I know I could of pretty much replicated my system as it was before by now but I'd rather get to the bottom of this, then I know how to fix the issue if confronted with it in the future.

If anyone has any ideas, feel free to share them

 

I had this before, and it was because I had two USB drives connected (one was a bootable USB flash drive, and the other was the USB hard drive which contained the image). Once I got into the windows restore section and windows backup was loaded, I removed the USB flash drive and it worked to restore the image.
I now use Paragon for this, there is a free edition that also creates the recovery environment on USB key.

 

If you're using an Image you made through Windows, it will only restore if the partitions are exactly the same as well, so you might want to double check if you partitioned your hard drive the same way. If not, I think you might be out of luck. Having multiple drives also messes up the thing.

 

Full-English---before i resorted to install a new drive,I'd check for errors on this drive, ect. You can run these programs from a dvd/cd with the problematic drive in there

heres some links on this:

Low-Level Format, Zero-Fill and Diagnostic Utilities

Defect Mapping and Spare Sectoring

Cheers
3Fees

 

I've had to admit defeat on the whole issue. Tried numerous attempts to restore from the image, but every time I get a step further, it throws another error at me. I've come to the conclusion the image may be corrupt in one way or another.