What's the secret to imaging a Win 7 HD?

[Doomer]

And have the restored image be bootable?

I have yet to find a program that can do this. All require startup repair to make them bootable and sometimes even that doesn't work.

 

[postmortemIA]

anything that copies the boot loader. never had problem with acronis, it does this by default when making images out of partitions

 

[Matt1970]

I have probably done 100 with Acronis over the years and I think I only had 2 that wouldn't boot right away but a quick startup repair got them booting.

 

[schmuckley]

Acronis..If you have a WD drive you can get/use it free here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&type=download

You have to have WD drive plugged in,but it doesn't have to be involved.

 

[Victorian Gray]

And have the restored image be bootable?

I have yet to find a program that can do this. All require startup repair to make them bootable and sometimes even that doesn't work.

Acronis, Paragon, Macrium and probably every other decent imaging program will do just that.

Been imaging my boot drive for years and used the 3 programs I mentioned and never had an issue about the restored image not being bootable.

Maybe you've got a bad drive? Maybe not setting the program parameters correctly?

 

[Cerb]

What programs have you tried that haven't worked?

Ghost
Acronis TI
Macrium Reflect
Clonezilla
gddrescue
And don't forget our good old pal, dd!

All of the above can do it, and most of them are beer free, some even Free free.

 

[RU482]

lol, beer free

What programs have you tried that haven't worked?

Ghost
Acronis TI
Macrium Reflect
Clonezilla
gddrescue
And don't forget our good old pal, dd!

All of the above can do it, and most of them are beer free, some even Free free.

 

[ViRGE]

Side note: this is why EFI is so awesome. We can ditch the damn boot sectors; EFI will just seek out the necessary .efi file at a predetermined location on the first FAT32 partition.

 

[Doomer]

I've tried Acronis and Reflect and a couple others I DL'ed and none of them restored a bootable image. Maybe I'm using older versions?

 

[HOSED]

The free version of Paragon backup + restore 2013 has this feature. I have used a USB bootable from the 2012 version of this program successfully with win 7
I made a screen shot but can not figure out how to upload from my local drive.
Tools- burn recovery media.

 

[taq8ojh]

I can vote for Acronis True Image. It's not free, but man it's worth every penny you spent on it.

ViRGE: can you throw some noob link about the (U)EFI (I still don't get any of it) stuff at me please?

 

[JackMDS]

I have used the Acronis TI Plus (restore to any hardware) hundred times through the years.

98% of the time it works very well. The 2% Not working is a relut of "Kinky" Hardware.

There are some times (especially in the past) compatibility issues between the tib (image file) and the version of the software that was used.

As a principle when I get a new verson first thing I make a bootable media and use it rather than using the installed software.

I kept all the bootable media since the first version that I got years ago. Thus I can restore very old backups too in case that they are not compatible with the current version.

P.S. Backup files are Not universal like txt or pdf, they usually using propriety structure and need to be recovered with software that can handle the specific structure.



😎

 

[ViRGE]

ViRGE: can you throw some noob link about the (U)EFI (I still don't get any of it) stuff at me please?

Sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#UEFIBOOT

Boot loaders can also be automatically detected by the UEFI firmwares, to enable booting from removable devices. Auto-detection relies on a standardized file path to the operating system loader, depending on the actual architecture to boot. Format of the file path is defined as <EFI_SYSTEM_PARTITION>/BOOT/BOOT<MACHINE_TYPE_SHORT_NAME>.EFI, e.g. /efi/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI