Friday, October 28, 2011

Restoring A Windows 7 Backup To A New Hard Drive

A common scenario is to use the built-in Windows 7 Backup & Restore functionality to create a system image, then install a bigger hard drive and try to restore the image to the new hard drive.  When i tried to do this, i got the error:

No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found

A quick search showed me i was not alone - even if the destination drive was the same size or bigger, i still got the error.  Finally i found the following solution:

  1. Boot into the Windows 7 DVD
  2. Format the destination drive to a single, empty partition (you can do this through the Windows 7 installer 'Advanced options' dialog)
  3. Select 'repair my computer'
  4. Open the command prompt
  5. Type diskpart to start the disk partition tool
  6. Type select disk=0 to change to the destination drive
  7. Type detail disk to check the details of the drive and ensure it is the correct one.  If not, repeat steps 6 & 7 with a different index until the correct disk details are displayed
  8. Type clean to reset the disk
  9. Type exit to exit the diskpart tool
  10. Select Restore from a system image and follow the wizard
The restore process should now complete successfully.  I found the above steps from the accepted answer in this thread.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

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