Hi, Disaster has struck and my Hard Disk has given up the ghost. It is a 1TB drive with two partitions: 1. 100MB System, Active, Primary Partition 2. 931.41GB Primary Partition Looking at the images I took using Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Suite I only have an image for the second one. If I buy a replacement drive I am guessing that even though it may say 1TB it may be a slightly different size. Is this true and could it cause problems restoring the image? The image has a total size of 931.4GB with used of 67.7GB and free of 863.6GB. What are the steps to: 1. Divide the new disk into the two partitions - is this necessary? 2. Configuring the first partition. 3. Restore the image with the potential for the target disk to be of a different size. Rams18.
The first partition is the boot partition (System Reserved Partition, SRP), configured when you install Windows 7. You can´t "configure" it afterwards, AFAIK. You can restore the second partition to a new disk and then, working from a WinPE boot medium with a Paragon program, open a command prompt and enter the command bcdboot c:\windows /s c: c: being the letter assigned to the partition (can be different in your case). Also, set the restored partition as "active". If this works well, it will create the boot information in the restored partition, and Windows will boot from this partition. Once you verify that you can boot correctly, you can resize the partition using the same boot medium, or the Windows Disk Manager.
Just to confirm, I don't need to create the first partition? Just have a single partition and the command you gave me will mean Windows can boot from a single partition? Also, I am contemplating replacing the broken disk with an SSD. Does this make a difference?
I´m assuming you are using Windows 7. Windows 7 can boot from a single partition. You need the SRP partition only when you use the encryption software BitLocker. If you don´t use BitLocker, you don´t need the SRP partition. [Some OEMs, Dell etc., install Windows 7 with a SRP partition and put the factory recovery image in it, but this is not your case as the SRP would be much larger if it contained a factory image]. In principle there is no difference if you use a SSD. But note that HDM 11 is old, it would be better to use a newer version of HDM and check in the global options that the restored image is aligned to the Vista standard. You can also enter the bcdboot command from a "repair" Windows 7 medium.
