Hi, last year or so, I made an image of my Windows 7 Ultimate install once I'd installed a few other things on it.
I've had to try and put the image onto another driver after a failure and can't get the system to boot.
So I've made an experiment and did a fresh install, made an image again, made sure I selected the Local disk and the hidden system reserved part.
If I go into recovery browser, it only shows the system reserved image and not the rest of my windows drive and files, may this be why I'm not having sucsess in using my image?
However I seem to have somewhat of a similar situation.
Just installed Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Used Ghost 15 to do a backup image of the Reserve Partition as well as the C:\ partition to an internal backup drive.
As a test, I hooked up another larger backup drive and ran the Ghost recovery CD. It saw both of the backed up partitions so I thought that I'm suppose to do the Reserve partition first and then come back and do the C:\ partition.
This was apparently wrong, as the Reserve Partition just used the entire Hard drive, instead of creating a 100mb Reserve Partition.
Then I decided to create a 100mb partition, leaving the rest of the drive unallocated. I then ran the restore for the Reserve partition in the newly created 100mb partition and then ran the restore for Drive C: in the unallocated part. Did not work. When I tried to boot with this drive it gave an error....Bootmgr is missing.
Since Win 7 now has two partitions (g-d knows why?) and having never tried to backup or restore Win 7 with this type of dual partition configuration, I'm at a loss how to successfully recover to the same or even new hard drive. (I assume the proceedure is different for each).
Any step by step instructions on this would be most appreciated.
On your first attempt when the System partition took up the entire drive, either you had a pre-existing partition on that drive or you used the option to expand the partition. I think your old data drive already had a partition, for best results start with a drive with no partitions, all unallocated space.
When you mention the second attempt that the partitions were letters D and G, your obviously "looking" at that drive from the working version of Windows.
Never try to restore an image when both new and old drives are present. Only after the new drive boots sucessfully can you reattach both drives to the system.
You want to delete the partitions on your test drive.
Then shut down the system and unplug the drive that has the working version of windows so you only have the test drive and the data drive containing the image attached.
Then boot the recovery disk and use Brians instructions in the link he posted to restore the images onto the test drive.
1. First I assume SRP stands for System Reserve Partition which Windows 7 creates and where the boot files are stored. Correct?
2. If I understand, I am to completely wipe the new larger drive so that there are no partitions. Is this correct?
If so, then when I go to recover the SRP first, won't it just use the entire hard drive rather than just creating a 100mb partition? That is what it did before.
3. Assuming it only creates the 100mb partition, like it is suppose to do, then I assume I am to start over and this time restore the Win7 (C:\) partition. Correct?
4. From the info it seems to suggest that the new Win 7 partition will not fill up the rest of the allocated space and that I will have to use a partition program to resize it to take advantage of all the unallocated space. Is this correct? I never had that extra step with XP when doing a restore.
5. Now lets assume I am just restoring over the same hard drive...maybe there was some corruption or virus attack. According to the instructions, it says "Restore to the same HD if a SRP is present For the SRP No need to restore". I don't understand...why don't I need to restore both the SRP and the boot drive?
6. The instructions says "Immediately after you have performed Copy Drive (before the shutdown) you won't see the new Win7 in Windows Explorer because it doesn't have a drive letter. This is appropriate. You will see the new Win7 partition in Disk Management."
I assume this is only if I am doing a clone not a restore. Correct?
7. I'm afraid I am not really clear on your last point...Unfortunately Ghost "creates" phantom drives which need to be deleted. See Red's post...which was sort of confusing as to when I delete the drive or if this really even applies to me.
Sorry for being kinda thick headed about this, but Ghost has always been very intuitive and has save my bacon on many occasions. But now with Win 7 I feel like I'm lost.
Hi, last year or so, I made an image of my Windows 7 Ultimate install once I'd installed a few other things on it.
I've had to try and put the image onto another driver after a failure and can't get the system to boot.
So I've made an experiment and did a fresh install, made an image again, made sure I selected the Local disk and the hidden system reserved part.
If I go into recovery browser, it only shows the system reserved image and not the rest of my windows drive and files, may this be why I'm not having sucsess in using my image?
Thanks, that is what I do. I want to avoid making a stupid mistake and mess up a good working drive so I always remove it from the equation and only have the backup drive and the new test drive attached.
I'll try again with no partitions first.
But this brings me to another point. What if I am restoring the same drive? Like I just posted above. Maybe it became corrupt or maybe a virus killed, but the drive is fine. Are you saying that I must first delete all partitions (SRP and WIN7) first before restoring?
The test your doing now is the same you would do for replacing a hard drive.
Thats when you start with an empty drive and have to restore all the partitions.
If you had a problem with windows or a virus or something, all you would need to do is restore the OS partition (C).
You can try that as soon as you get your test drive working. You can change the desktop wallpaper or make other changes and preted that windows is screwed up.
Then you just boot to the recovery disk and restore the C drive image right on top of the existing partition.
There is no need to remove partitions in that case because the image "fits" the existing partition and everything else can remain unchanged.
I had changed my profile awhile back and forgot to delete the old one. Guess Roboform decided for me which profile to sign in too. Need to delete the old one.
I did not realize that I could do both at the same time. I restored the SRP first then when back and did the Win 7 partition.
It was interesting because even though the drive was void of any partition, once I restored the SRP and went back to restore Win7, I noticed that restoring the SRP added the Win7 partition with a large unallocated space in the Ghost restore window. (I was restoring to a larger drive than the original drive) . I picked the Win7 partition, which was the actual size of the original HD. Once all was done, the new larger HD booted up successfully. Then I used my partition program to resize the Win7 partition to combine the unallocated space into one Win7 partition.
Guess I did it not do this as efficiently as I could have.
At least I'm comfortable now knowing that I can restore this computer's HD if need be.