Win 7 system image restore

[Gooberlx2]

In case anyone was curious about how well the Win7 Image restore function works. I can say it does.

Last night my system drive went kaput. I thought it was my RAM at first since during startup repair I would get an error to the effect of "can't write to memory location 0xblahblah". I think it was actually the location of a failed sector on the HDD. Win7's memcheck and Memtest86 confirmed the RAM was okay. Though, chkdsk /f c: didn't really turn up anything either.

Anyway, it was an old IDE drive (200GB Western Digital), master via cable select. After figuring out it was the system drive itself that must have been bad, and some extra trial and tribulation; I found I had to unplug the old/dead drive and plug another unused IDE drive (250GB Western Digital) in at that master position on the cable. Then restore worked fine. It wouldn't work if I had the new drive plugged in at the slave position.

So anyway once all that was done, I restored and everything booted and worked well again. Not completely intuitive (I didn't realize the new drive had to be in the same "position" as the original), I also didn't see any options for restoring just individual partitions. But it does work.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Gooberlx2
Though, chkdsk /f c: didn't really turn up anything either.

That's because you need to use /r to scan for bad sectors.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Originally posted by: Gooberlx2
Though, chkdsk /f c: didn't really turn up anything either.

That's because you need to use /r to scan for bad sectors.

Huh...I thought I missed a flag, but it was late and my eyes hurt. I guess I just didn't see it in the list. I might reconnect that drive and run it again later today then.

 

[tcsenter]

chkdsk {drive letter or volume}: /r

The /r switch implies /f. It may take a few hours to complete.