Windows – How to restore Windows 7 from a System Image to a Boot Camp partition without formatting

backupboot-campmacossystem-restorewindows 7

I had a 70GB Boot Camp partition on my iMac that I wanted to increase the size of, so after creating a system image (.vhd) on an external FW drive of the Boot Camp partition using Windows Backup and Restore, I removed the Boot Camp partition from within OS X and re-created one that is now 140GB.

When I go to restore the system image using the Windows 7 installation disc or the repair disc, it says that when restoring the image, the entire [physical?] disk is going to be erased and formatted so that the image can be restored to it. (I don't see any options to choose just a partition!)

I've considered that there may be a command line utility on the Windows 7 install disc to restore the VHD to the partition, but can't find any documentation for such. Is there a cost-free way to just restore the system image backup to the new partition while preserving the OSX partition?

EDIT:

Basically what I am saying is that when installing Windows 7, there is an option to install to a specific partition on the physical disk, but when restoring, I do not see that option…

UPDATE: (bounty)

I am still looking for a way to restore a VHD image to an NTFS formatted partition on a hard drive. Specifically a boot camp partition on a Mac.

I really don't understand why Windows won't allow this, although it allows installing to a partition…

Best Answer

I would suggest to first install Windows 7 on the new partition as a new installation.

Then, within Windows 7, Restore your computer from a system image backup using Control Panel -> Recovery -> Advanced recovery methods -> Use a system image you created earlier to recover your computer, and then follow the steps.

If worse comes to worst, you can always mount the .vhd in Disk Management to retrieve your data.

EDIT

I have found new info from this article using Acronis True Image Home 2011 (trial version available):
Restoring Windows 7 VHD Backup Files with Acronis True Image Home 2010.

The article says:

Windows 7 has a special System Reserved Partition, which is hidden and contains boot files. This partition can be viewed in Windows Disk Management (Start-Run -> diskmgmnt.msc).

When making an image of your Windows system using the Windows 7 Backup tool, it will create a separate .vhd file for each partition that is in the system, including the System Reserved Partition.

If you choose to restore your system partition from the created Windows 7 Backup .vhd files, you will need to restore the whole disk where this system partition is.

Solution

Boot from Acronis Bootable Media and select Acronis True Image Home (Full version)

Click Recovery, browse to your Windows 7 Backup .vhd files and select any of the files

Once selected, right-click on the .vhd file and select Recover

Select Recover whole disks and partitions and click Next

Check the partition to recover

This approach has failed if you are warned that all data on the destination disk will be erased:

Related Solutions

Macos – rEFIt gives me a “Boot Legacy OS from HD” option when I have only Max OS X after erasing the Boot Camp partition

Warning: Please be sure you have a good idea of what exactly is happening before following any advice that I write here. This may be risky! Please do a bit more Googling before pressing ENTER on a Linux terminal. :)

I had this same problem after I removed a partition containing Windows 7 using Disk Utility. The problem in my case was that the Windows 7 partition was removed, but the Windows boot loader installed on the Master Boot Record (often denoted MBR) remained. To remove it, use dd as in the example below.

EXAMPLE: If your Windows boot loader is installed on the MBR of your sda drive, from a Linux terminal run: (WARNING, DON'T BLINDLY TYPE THIS WITHOUT READING THE DESCRIPTION ABOVE:) sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1

The dd command is also helpful if you have an extra GRUB boot loader installed somewhere. For example, I mistakenly installed a GRUB boot loader on my second hard drive both in the second hard drive's MBR and in the second hard drive's first partition. rEFIt listed both of the boot loaders, even though only the one installed on the second hard drive's MBR worked. So to remove the extra GRUB boot loader on the first partition of the second drive I also used dd as below.

EXAMPLE 2: If you have an extra GRUB boot loader installed on a partition, in this example partition sdb1, from a Linux terminal run dd as in the example below. (Notice the "of=..." changed and the "bs=..." changed from the first example.) (WARNING, DON'T BLINDLY TYPE THIS WITHOUT READING THE DESCRIPTION ABOVE:) sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=446 count=1

I know this is an old question, but it was never really answered. I hope this helps many people who were led to this page while searching for this problem. God bless!

Mac – Create a VM from DMG disk image created from Windows XP Boot Camp Partition

Okay, so, first off: mount your .DMG image as a volume. You can do this by just double-clicking the image. The Finder window should come up with the image contents.

You can then make a virtual disk from the mounted image by following this guide. If you're having a hard figuring out the device path (like /dev/disk1) then you can simply open Disk Utility once the image is mounted. If you right-click on the .DMG (shown on the left-hand side), you can go to "Information" and it should have the disk number ("disk1", for example.)

From there, following the guide (and assuming "disk1"), do:

/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk1
# Here you make sure partition 1 is the one you want...
/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk1 1 boot-camp-link ide
/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager -r boot-camp-link.vmdk -t 0 boot-camp.vmdk

Now you should wind up with a "boot-camp.vmdk" that you can use as a disk in a Fusion VM.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Macos – rEFIt gives me a “Boot Legacy OS from HD” option when I have only Max OS X after erasing the Boot Camp partition

Mac – Create a VM from DMG disk image created from Windows XP Boot Camp Partition

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