Question re System Image Restore

Hi everyone
I am running 2 HDD (C is Primary) and D is used simply as a backup drive (Norton Backup data and a couple of other little files).
I have a System Image on an External Drive which has both Drives backed up as the image.
My C Drive has failed and now I want to move my old D drive to replace the Primary C Drive.
How will the restore function work if it is looking for 2 drives to restore the system image to? The u/s drive is on it's way back to Seagate to be replaced but I don't want to have to wait 10 days or so waiting for it.

Any help you can give would be much appreciated.

 

Hi Chill,
Welcome to BBS

was the system image created using Norton, Seagates Diskwizard (Acronis Based) or Microsoft (Win7 Backup)?

Could you also post your system info you will find the links under User CP located at the top left of screen

Regards Jac

 

Hi Jac
Have updated what I can in the User CP (away from my home PC at the moment).
System image was created using Windows 7 backup.

 

Thanks Christer - should be visible now.

 

It depends on how you chose to make the image. If you chose to image all drives when you made the image, then it would be a problem. I suppose if you have enough room on the drive you're installing to you could partition it so you still had two drives and then do the image restore. If you did that though, you'll end up with three drives instead of two when you put the new hard drive in. Don't know if that bothers you or not. It wouldn't be a problem for Windows though.

On the other hand, by default Windows only makes an image of the system drive, so, if you didn't manually select the d drive when you made the image, you should be able to do what you want without any problems. Only problem I can think of is if you happened to have shortcuts on your c drive that pointed to the d drive which wouldn't be all that big a deal to take care of.

 

Thanks Zander. Neither drives had made than about 300Gb data on each so I guess I could partition the 1Tb drives into 2 and use this option. Not too worried about overwriting the data backup on D as I also have this duplicated as part of the System Image on my external drive.
Unfortunately had D as a bootable drive as well so yes the system image also took this.
Might give it a shot when I get in tonight and let you know how I get on.

 

Well, if the d drive was bootable, you might run into problems with that. Not sure what to tell you but my guess is that the d drive wouldn't boot after you do this. I could be wrong but more than likely Windows boot files would be pointing to the wrong place and that would cause the drive to not boot. I'd wait for a bit and see if somebody else has something to say about it. I've done a lot of this in the past with other OS's but haven't really had to with Win7 yet so I'm not really sure just how things work with it in this regard.

 

Thanks Zander, and yep it didn't work. Among all the other issues apparently you have to restore to a disc that is either the same size or larger than the one copied from so partitioning a 1Tb disc into 2 x 500Gb won't work.
Guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and wait for the replacement HDD to arrive from Seagate.

 

Hey Chill,
Seems as Zander has got this in hand now so I might leave it with him.
I did try the M/S back-up facility, but I prefer Seatools (Seagate's freeware & Acronis based) as I can back up the system partition (C) and restore it easily ( I run 2 partitions on the laptop), but you need to do it often unlike the full acronis as it does not do incremental

Regards Jac