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Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby khonjo » Mon Jul 20, 2009 1:38 pm

I attempted to move W7 x64 from one physical drive to another by restoring VHD image but failed. The details as follows:
I added a new physical drive, created three primary partitions and one extended partitions in which three logical partition were further created.
I created and saved a VHD file for the W7 x64 on one of the three logical partitions.
I set the top primary partition active.
Shut off the machine and removed the old physical hdd where W7 is installed.
Turned on the machine, inserted the W7 x64 DVD, booted from it and selected “Repair”
The VHD image on the logical drive was detected.
When it attempted to restore from the system image the following message was returned. What could be wrong with the above steps?

The system image restore failed.
Error details: Windows did not find any disk which it can use for recreating volumes present in backup. Offline disks, cluster shared disks or disks explicitly excluded by user will not be used by Windows. Ensure that disks are online and no disks are excluded by mistake.(0x80042414).
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby Grav!ty » Mon Jul 20, 2009 2:09 pm

I doubt what you're trying to do is possible for a number of reasons, including that the hardware a virtual machine uses on a VHD has little if any relation to the hardware of the PC. Also, my understanding of the repair function of Vista and Windows 7 is limited to a startup repair and the other alternatives listed in the menu that appears when accessing it and not a full system repair like it was possible for XP.
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby JabbaPapa » Mon Jul 20, 2009 2:13 pm

Windows Vista and Seven order hard drives differently than NT/XP, particularly where Logical Partitions are present on a drive with Physical ones. As a result, boot configurations cannot easily be migrated to hard drives partitioned as you have described.

It is even possible, though not necessarily likely, that Logical partitions may be unsuitable for the task you are attempting to perform.

I would assume this is a multi-boot system ? Can you please post extra details about your installed Operating Systems, or is the following "OS: W2K, WVT64SP2, W7x64RC" from your signature file correct ?

What are the contents of your three Primary Partitions ? In the above multiboot scenario, you should ideally have W2000, Vista, and W7 installed in that order to the three Primary partitions, which should be partitions 1, 2, and 3 of your hard drive.

It might be worth clean installing W7 to the desired partition, to ensure that all boot data in the boot partition is correct prior to restoring your VHD of the existing W7 setup from your old hard drive to that same partition, formatting it if necessary --- given that there appear to be some differences between how Vista and W7 manage boot, and furthermore that your partitioning structure is VERY non-standard, so that a purely manual solution might prove better than using the automated protocols of VistaBootPRO that have been designed primarily with fairly simple partitioning and multiboot scenarios in mind NOT involving Windows versions earlier than XP...
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby khonjo » Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:39 pm

Thank you, Gravity and JobbaPapa for your response.

my understanding of the repair function of Vista and Windows 7 is limited to a startup repair and the other alternatives listed in the menu that appears when accessing it and not a full system repair like it was possible for XP

Since a complete system backup can be made, the repair function must include restoring the system from the backup.
It is even possible, though not necessarily likely, that Logical partitions may be unsuitable for the task you are attempting to perform.

The repair process correctly identified the backup stored on the logical or primary partition.

What are the contents of your three Primary Partitions ? In the above multiboot scenario, you should ideally have W2000, Vista, and W7 installed in that order to the three Primary partitions, which should be partitions 1, 2, and 3 of your hard drive.

W7, Vista and W2k are installed in this order. Please note that each os is installed completely independent of other oses. The bootmgr of W7 or Vista is not modified. When attempting to restore from VHD, the HDD on which the above oses are installed is turned off.

What I do not understand is that the error message indicates "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found."

It might be worth clean installing W7 to the desired partition, . . .

Following this suggestion, I clean installed W7x64 7100 onto the partition on which I have been attempting to restore the system from the VHD image. There was no problem at all.

Any further suggestion is appreciated.
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Video: ATI Radeon HD 5770
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby JabbaPapa » Tue Jul 21, 2009 7:38 am

khonjo wrote:
It is even possible, though not necessarily likely, that Logical partitions may be unsuitable for the task you are attempting to perform.

The repair process correctly identified the backup stored on the logical or primary partition.


No, I meant that the target partition may not necessarily be suitable, not that a logical partition might be unsuitable as a location to store your VHD data.

khonjo wrote:
What are the contents of your three Primary Partitions ? In the above multiboot scenario, you should ideally have W2000, Vista, and W7 installed in that order to the three Primary partitions, which should be partitions 1, 2, and 3 of your hard drive.

W7, Vista and W2k are installed in this order. Please note that each os is installed completely independent of other oses. The bootmgr of W7 or Vista is not modified. When attempting to restore from VHD, the HDD on which the above oses are installed is turned off.


Then I'm not sure I understand your desired setup, and it also sounds pretty overcomplicated.

Can you please post an image from Start > Computer > right-click > Manage > Disk Management of your hard drives ? It might help.

I have to say though, that generally speaking, it is not such a good idea to try and create multiboot scenarios involving switching various hard drives on and off, or changing boot priority in BIOS/CMOS et cetera -- but it is particularly difficult where hard drives are partitioned to include a mix of primary and logical partitions when you wish to mix'n'match 9x/2k/XP versions of Windows with the new boot loader used by Vista/W7.

Normally, the most desirable multiboot scenario involving these three operating systems would involve ALL boot data residing on Partition 1 of Hard Disc 0, where ideally your legacy OS (in your case Windows 2000) would be installed.

But this talk of turning hard drives on and off is very confusing --- are these hard drives internal hard drives in a desktop machine, or are you using an external USB hard drive or something ?

We really do need some more details to help you, we need to know your actual setup and to understand why exactly you wish to proceed as you have described, as it is a very unusual scenario.

khonjo wrote:What I do not understand is that the error message indicates "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found."


You are probably lacking necessary boot data on your boot partition. This is not that surprising if you have been disabling the hard drive where this data is located.

khonjo wrote:
It might be worth clean installing W7 to the desired partition, . . .

Following this suggestion, I clean installed W7x64 7100 onto the partition on which I have been attempting to restore the system from the VHD image. There was no problem at all.

Any further suggestion is appreciated.


I'm still a bit confused sorry, have you performed this task with any hard drives not plugged in ? I'm sorry, but I made that suggestion on the apparently false grounds that you were attempting to create a more or less standard Windows multiboot system where you would use the Vista/W7 boot manager to select your Windows version at boot.
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby khonjo » Tue Jul 21, 2009 1:27 pm

But this talk of turning hard drives on and off is very confusing --- are these hard drives internal hard drives in a desktop machine, or are you using an external USB hard drive or something ?

The hard drive(SATA) is in a desktop machine. Turning hard drive off means disconnecting it from the system by either unplugging the power connector or SATA cable from it. Thus, when I am trying to restore W7, only a new hard drive with the backup stored on it is connected to the system. The trial clean installation of W7 as you suggested was done with this hard drive. This physical drive has three primary partitions and three logical partitions so you can visualize how it will be shown on Disk Management. I am trying to restore W7 on the first primary partition.

Let me put my issue differently:
Suppose your hard drive where W7 is installed clashes or becomes totally unusable, you want to upgrade the physical drive to one with larger capacity or you want to make a clone physical hard drive as a backup, and you have the W7 VHD image saved on a removable drive. How do you restore the W7 system onto a new hard drive from the VHD image(complete system backup)?
Mobo: GA-790XTA-UD4 with BIOS F2
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RAM: 16GB GSkill DDR3 1333 4GBx4
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Video: ATI Radeon HD 5770
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby Grav!ty » Tue Jul 21, 2009 1:33 pm

Julian, this is an attempt at transferring the contents of a Virtual Hard Drive from a Virtual PC to be a bootable installation on a normal HDD.

In my opinion this is not going to happen for a number of reasons including those I've already stated. The only reasons I can come up with why anyone would want to achieve this is that the Virtual PC installation already contains a lot of data and applications that one wants to maintain, or that it is an attempt to circumvent licensing.

Assuming that one does achieve this (say by mounting the VHD image via the command prompt of say the Windows 7 DVD using the command prompt version of diskpart.exe and X-copying the entire contents of the VHD to a HDD), the Windows 7 installation is going to go into all sorts of wobbles when it is booted because of the entirely different set of hardware compared to the virtual hardware that OS system was originally installed and configured on, in addition to which activation is going to be triggered for th same reason...totally different set of hardware.
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby khonjo » Tue Jul 21, 2009 1:54 pm

this is an attempt at transferring the contents of a Virtual Hard Drive from a Virtual PC to be a bootable installation on a normal HDD.

The problem has nothing to do with Virtual PC. I do not have Virtual PC. The word "VHD" may confuses you but it is a complete system backup created by a utility which comes with W7. It can be reviewed by going Start -> Maintenance -> Backup and Restore.
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Video: ATI Radeon HD 5770
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby JabbaPapa » Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:14 pm

Thank you for the extra information, as there are multiple possible scenarios :)

You should then be able to restore your backup from within the clean W7 that you have currently installed, and I am glad to hear that this is to go into a Primary partition.

Graham, this method cannot be used to circumvent licensing anyway, as Windows will automatically request reactivation ;) Also, I have found that transferring a W7 setup from one computer to another, despite some little difficulties, and assuming existence of a valid license and product key, is a LOT easier than any previous Windows version -- which is all a bit off-topic as regards khonjo's questions :)
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Re: Restoring W7 to new physical drive by VHD image

Postby khonjo » Tue Jul 21, 2009 5:47 pm

JabbaPapa wrote:You should then be able to restore your backup from within the clean W7 that you have currently installed, and I am glad to hear that this is to go into a Primary partition.

I want to restore W7 from the backup onto the first primary partition where the W7 resides which was clean installed for trial basis. It must be feasible to restore W7 to 2nd or 3rd primary partition instead, but the W7 presently residing on the first partition does not need to be there in order to do what I want. Another word the W7 on the first partition will not be taking any role in restoring W7 from its backup.
In your reply as above it is stated as "restore your backup from within the clean W7", but recovery of a complete system from its backup cannot be performed within W7 being up and running. The restore process begins by letting the machine boot from a W7 setup DVD or a W7 Repair Disk and proceeds from there.
Mobo: GA-790XTA-UD4 with BIOS F2
CPU: Phenom II x4 970 3.5GHz
RAM: 16GB GSkill DDR3 1333 4GBx4
HDD: SATA-300 x2 Hitachi HDE721010SLA330 & HDS721010CLA332
Video: ATI Radeon HD 5770
Audio: Xonar DS
PSU: Corsair VX450W 450W
Monitor: Gateway FPD2485W & Dell UltraSharp U2410, Screen Res.: 1920x1200
OS: W7 x64 Ultimate
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