TR Forums

I am using Windows 7 64-bit. I have used the included Backup and Restore Function to create a system image of my OS drive. The drive just crashed, so I am trying to restore the image to another (larger) HDD. I am using the system restore disk that Windows created. When I boot of the DVD, I get into the repair/restore just fine. It is able to find the system image on my USB drive. However, when I tell it to start the restore, it errors out with a message saying no usable hard drive is available. The drive has no existing partition or volume on it. I have tried looking online, but can't seem to find an answer that works for me. Any advice?

I believe that System Restore is only a partial image of your C drive and can only restore to that exact drive.
What you are trying to do is "cloning" your C drive to another drive, and would require cloning software.

Either use Diskpart to partition and format the drive or select "Format and repartition disks" in the restore Wizard.

Guide

Actually the first time I tried this, the hard drive had a partition on it. I removed it in case it was interfering. When I go through the process, the box for Format and Repartition is checked automatically. In fact, I couldn't uncheck that option if I wanted to.

Here is a more explicit version of the steps I am taking. I have an internal HDD, the USB disk, and the DVD drive.

1. Boot from Recovery DVD
2. Because no version of Windows is found, goes to System Image Recovery
3. Select the latest available system image (which is the correct image)
4. "Format and repartition disks" is checked. If I click "Exclude disks..." The drive the image is suppose to be restore to is present and not checked
5. click next
6. Get a dialog box about the image to be restored. Click finish
7. DVD drive spins up, then get an error message saying "The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for covering the system can be found."

There is an option to provide SATA drivers before the restore attempts to occur. Have you tried that?

Nope, but I figured since it saw the drive I didn't need to. I will try that. Thank you.

Found something that seems to work.

1. Start the System Recovery Disk
2. Open command prompt
3. Start Diskpart
4. Select disk to restore to
5. use the "Clean" command
6. Go through the System Image store wizard as before.

It hasn't finished yet, but I have gotten farther than I have before.

apkellogg wrote:

Nope, but I figured since it saw the drive I didn't need to. I will try that. Thank you.

Yeah, you shouldn't have to, but since we were already in the it should be working territory it was worth a shot.

Hopefully using Diskpart will lead to success.

Using the Diskpart to clean the disk I was able to get the image to restore. I just had to boot back into the recovery mode to extend the partition to fill the whole drive. Thank you for the help.

If you took a full backup, its a VHD file of your old drive, which can be mounted as any other VHD, or restored, but since a VHD amounts to a full disk image, it restores a drive and partition, not really the data on the partition. If you look in the disk manager you can attach a VHD as any other disk image and it will show it as just another harddrive.

Wonder if you ran into some error if there was an old boot block or some other thing relating to the former partition that went away with the clean command. Or of it had something to do with the geometry of the new vs. the old drive. Especially since the Windows format nowdays uses padding to align the partition with the drive blocks.

This is what Microsoft page says about clean...
"Use the clean command to remove partition or volume formatting from the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors. By default, only the MBR or GPT partitioning information and any hidden sector information on MBR disks is overwritten. If you specify the all parameter, each and every sector can be zeroed, and all data that is contained on the drive can be deleted."

Hi Apkellogg

Thank you very much for posting your solution worked like a charm. I have been racking my brain all day trying to get this to work. Wonder why they didn't put this in the details. Seems like it's a common problem.
Any way just wanted to give you a big thank you for your post.

Apkellog, thanks a lot for posting it. I've been looking for a solution for the last two days. It worked great. In my case i hd to reboot after running the clean format to make it work. Thanks a lot again, indeed. Cheers.