Creating a Windows 7 Image is easy, however restoring from it can lead to all sorts of interesting problems!
I created a Windows 7 Image of my Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit of a 500GB Hard Drive that contained less than 14.1GB of data contained on 3 x DVD-R Discs.
After creating this image, I went to test the image by restoring the image to a spare 250GB hard drive that I had laying around. I simply with computer off, plugged the 250GB drive into the SATA power and com cables and attempted to boot the computer off of DVD 1 of the 3 DVD set of the image. DVD 1 of the set as I found out is NON-Bootable! ( Coming from using Ghost for years, I at first thought that maybe it was a bad image burn, but google search specified otherwise )
You have to use the Windows 7 Emergency Repair Disc to boot the system, and then follow instructions as linked at this website to restore from image.
http://www.petri.co.il/restore-windows-7-from-backup-image.htm* What they dont tell you are these facts:
--> The drive to take the image restore has to be equal to or greater storage capacity than the original hard drive. ( even if only 13GB of the 500GB hard drive contains data, it will fail trying to restore to a 250GB hard drive the 13GB of contents from a 500GB hard drive! , because it wants to create a C: partition that is of same size of that of the original hard drive )
--> If you plan on using this image on drives smaller than the original hard drive its best to use the built in Windows 7 Partition Shrink feature to make the C: drive for the images partition dimensions as small as possible! ( I had to use this feature to shrink the 500GB drives C: partition to around 250GB, and then create a whole new DVD image set. In order to squeeze this system image to a 250GB hard drive. * I could only shrink this hard drives C: partition using the built in Shrink feature to Windows 7 down by a maximum of 50% of that of the entire drives capacity. I wanted to shrink it further, but it would not allow it with the built in Windows 7 Shrink utility! )
--> If you restore this image in my case a image created then for the 250GB hard drive and restore it with no problems to a larger hard drive, the partition for C: on the hard drive stays at the size of that of the original hard drive. ( So in my case I also had a spare 300GB Maxtor drive and installed that in place of the 250GB and restored the image to the 300GB hard drive. While it was successful, when looking at Disk Management afterfinding the C: drive size not to be 300GB but 250GB, I found 50GB of unallocated space. So If you had a system with a 250GB hard drive fail and you replace the drive with a 2TB drive, you will find yourself looking at a C: partition of 250GB and the rest of it would be unallocated wasted space! )
--> When restoring from DVD set most would think that you place DVD or Disc #1 into the drive when going through the motion of restoring from image backup. If you do this and do not read what the prompt says you will get frustrated when the Image Restore Utility can not find the Image... The box where you can normally select the image to restore from will be blank. If you finally read the prompt in the GUI as I finally did you will find out that its requesting THE LAST Disc in my case the DVD #3 of the 3 DVD image set to be placed into the drive first. Placing the last DVD from the set into the drive you then can select the Image from the list in the utility under the GUI that was created from the Windows 7 Emergency Recovery Disc. After this image is selected, it will then request the Disc #1 of the set and then the remaining Disc's as it restores the image to the drive
--> One FINAL SURPRISE for those like myself, who have spare hard drives and like to test utilities like the Windows 7 Image utility to know how they work and to make sure the images are known to be good vs waiting for when the system dies to then realize you have a useless broken image!.... Windows 7 Image Utility when restoring the hard drive contents to another hard drive will overwrite the UNIQUE ID of the other drive with that of the SAME UNIQUE ID of the original hard drive that the image was created from. This is not a problem for anyone planning on using this replacement drive as a replacement drive, but after the drive is wiped clean and used once again as an external hard drive with the same system that it was used in testing the image on, this drive will cause the Windows 7 Disk Manager to unmount this drive. And when you go into Windows 7 Disk Management you will see the error message associated with why it can not be mounted and used as an external hard drive... The message of " OFFLINE ( The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online ) ". This is because the Windows 7 Image utility overwrote the UNIQUE ID of the replacement hard drive with that of the original hard drive that the image was created from. And on Windows 7, drives that are mounted have to have Unique ID's.
I can see this being a problem for someone who uses this utility to upgrade to a larger hard drive and use the old prior still healthy hard drive as either a slave for extra storage or making it into an external hard drive for use on the same system it came out of!
Fortunately the fix for this UNIQUE ID conflict is easy. Both drives had the same Unique ID which was a Hex ID of 63C14ADE. I was able to attach this external hard drive which shared the same UNIQUE ID, to another different Windows 7 computer I had so that it would mount as an external hard drive, and run DISKPART as administrator. This then gave me the DISK PART Prompt. From here I was able to list my drives via the LIST DISK command to find the mount location of the 300GB hard drive which was Disk 2. When the other drives of this system were 500GB was DISK 0 and 90GB was DISK 1, so I was then able to change the UNIQUE ID of this external hard drive at the mount location of DISK 2 by giving the command at Disk Part Prompt of:
SELECT DISK 2 UNIQUEID DISK ID=63C14ADC ( followed by ENTER Key )
I could have changed its Unique ID to any hex value not in use, but chose to just change the last value from E to C on this drive. I then was able to properly dismount this USB attached external 300GB SATA drive and connect it back to the original computer that it originally had conflicts with and it mounted fine so that I could perform a faster 24GB transfer / install of a large mmorpg game from my old computer to my new computer without having to redownload the game Aion from NCSoft all over again.
So in future Windows 7 builds, I am going to use the smallest hard drive available, which I have a 80GB SATA hard drive that hasn't been used in years because its too small for my normal computing needs, but it actually can serve a purpose now to build systems clean using that 80GB hard drive. After Windows 7 has been installed, Drivers installed, Activated with Microsoft, All Security Updates, and All Programs that are part of Default Build .... Create a Windows 7 Image using the built in free image utility off of that 80GB drive to a group of DVD's or to an external hard drive if its greater than 25GB.
Then Restore the image to the intended Hard Drive for installation, such as a 1TB hard drive. Then when this is complete, resize my C: partition so that instead of it remaining at 80GB of the 1TB partition with over 900GB of wasted unallocated space, C: partition now consumes all of the unallocated space.
* And I will also know, never to try to use that 80GB SATA hard drive as 2nd hard drive or external hard drive in any of the builds that it was used in creating to avoid the UNIQUE ID Signature Collision with other Disks!
