Restore Windows 7 Image to different hard disk

Question

I have an issue which has been driving me mad. I am trying to restore an image of a Windows 7 partition made with Windows Backup to a different hard disk drive (the original drive is failing) but in the System Recovery disk I always get the error "No disk that can be used for recording the system disk can be found".

The original drive was a 500GB non-SSD drive partitioned into a 40GB system partition and a 460GB data partition. I created a system image of the 40GB partition (so C: and the System Reserved parstition) using the built-in Windows Backup utility to an external USB drive. I the disconnected the original drive and installed a 180GB SSD in the system.

When I run the System Recovery Disk, everything seems fine: the utility can see the backup and my new SSD drive is listed in the Excluded drives dialogue (but not checked) and then when it comes to actually write back to the new disk I get the error.

So far I have tried creating a partition on the new SSD and running the CLEAN command on the SSD disk using DiskPart from the command line options.

There are lots of instances on the web of people getting this behaviour but none of the solutions are working for me. I'm posting here as I hope someone can actually explain WHY it is failing. My suspicion is that because the source HDD is bigger than the target HDD, even though the source partition is smaller than the target partition, System Recovery is refusing to restore.

I would have thought that people restoring from an old failed hard drive to a new one would be a common operation and should be allowed by the utility.

Solution

Looks like what I wanted was not possible through the standard Windows backup utility. In the end I used Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx) and once installed, it took me less than half an hour to get the whole thing moved across to an SSD.

Comments

[takesides]

I did not. I had assumed that System Restore would sort that out. It seems a bit of a complex step for most users. Would the alignment actually prevent Windows from restoring to the disk though?

[Psycogeek]

Yes, it is done all the time, but rarely do I read about people doing it with the windows utility, expert and consumer alike they are more likely to be using a 3rd party cloning utility, that addresses all the possible issues and problems, and provides more user oriented information when there is a problem.

[DavidPostill]

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