Restore - Safest Practice Method?

Hello,
I'm new to HDM Suite 15, but have so far:
1. Created both WinPE and Linux recovery media on Thumb drive, CD and USB drive
2. Created both full and incremental backups on my external USB Drive
3. Mounted these backups and extracted individual files.

I have never restored a PC after a hard drive failure, but I think it is important to practice doing this before I do it for real, so I will feel a bit less panicky if I have to do it for real. This is my setup:

1. 2 single partition drives. Main drive with OS and data (Win 7 x64 sp1) is a 250GB SSD. Secondary drive is 1TB Hybrid HDD.
2. Motherboard is ASUS BIOS + uEFI

My copy of Windows is OEM.

I have altered my BIOS so it looks first for bootable USB.

Can someone please describe (in very simple language!) the steps I should follow to test that I can do a restore?

I do have an old 500GB SATA HDD which I can format and place in a USB cradle. Could I use this in the test process?

Thanks for any advice!

 

Do you want to practice the restore to a different disk? Have you restored images to the same disk?

 

Hi,
I've never restored an OS before, just retrieved individual data files from a backup. I've read up what I can on how to do a practice run, although there is lots of contradictory advice on what to do. I think what I want to do is:

1. Make my backups and recovery media (already done, but since I want to restore to different hardware, see below, is there anything I need to consider?)
2. Physically disconnect the C: drive (SSD) where my OS is. (in itself this is scary, I've never mucked about inside a PC before, but I do have an anti-static strap)
3. Boot up with the recovery media
4. Restore my backup from the USB it is on to my old HDD (standard HDD) which I will connect using a USB cradle.

At a high level, this seems ok to me, but I'm untrained in the way hardware and OS work when they're being played about with like this. I have concerns like:
1. Can I restore my OS from an SSD to an HDD?
2. Will I hit Windows activation issues either when restoring to the old HDD or trying to go back to my main configuration?
3. Should I worry about drivers for my old HDD, or trust that Windows will have them?

Thanks in advance for any advice