I bought a new computer that came with a 2 TB SATA HDD. I want to use this as an external backup and bought a SANDISK Extreme to be my main boot disk. I created a Repair Disk and a Windows 7 System Image from the original hard drive. Then I switched drives and booted the computer with the repair disk.
I should be able to restore my system image to the SANDISK Extreme. It ‘sees’ the drive. I’ve been able to go into DISKPART and create partitions and volumes, format and etc. However, when I try to restore the system image, I’m told there is no available drive that can be used for this.
Thus, I have to think there is something in the way I’ve formatted or something but cannot figure it out.
What am I missing?
Thank you
Hi, Not really sure if this applies to Sandisk SSDs but the 3 time’s I’ve restored a system image to a new SSD it’s been to a completely bare drive, no format, no partitions, no nothing. Simply let the system boot from the recovery disk, selected the system image off my NAS and that’s it! didn’t even need to reboot or anything. I’ve always just come back an hour or two later to a booted, running OS ;). The one thing I did find out the hard way though was if I did create a partition or format on these other drives I NEEDED to do a secure erase before it would work for this.
Actually, that’s why I’m here… I’m a little choked to see there’s no Secure Erase feature in the Sandisk utility… But that’s another matter. I’ll dig around a bit to see what I can find on the forum.
Oh, I should add, Windows (7 anyway) will only do a system restore to a drive the same size or larger than the original. So your 2 TB drive needs to have the OS partition shrunk to at least the same formatted size or smaller than your SSD. Disk Manager can do this, but if you use DiskPart I’m sure you already know how to do that ;). If those two utilities won’t shrink far enough, you might have to pare down the OS (Move user data, downloads, shrink page file, remove hybrid sleep, ect) and use third party software to shrink the partition.
