hi, i have a simple question im so frustrated about, because i did not find the answer anywhere on the whole internet, nor the restore process dialogues - WHERE it restores the image to? on which drive? i have 3 drives on my computer, one failing i made an image of, one ive put the image backup to, and the new and empty one i want to restore the image to... i did not find the destination selection in the recovery dialogue...

thank you for answer

I've never done it myself, have you seen this already?
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/system-image-recovery-in-windows-7-8/

yes i was googling for these guides like half a day, saw a lot of them, i read through the one you sent and its not different... it also does not mention where it restores to, altough i managed to try it at the end and it restores without question to the original drive, and as my drive is failing (SMART reports) this is not what i want.. im just really surprised one cannot select a destination disk to restore the data to :O

The last time I had an HDD failure with SMART errors, I used Ghost to do a disk-to-disk copy to another drive.

well i managed to do it with Macrium Reflect at the end, and it was walkin in the park..

im still really shocked that there is no word about the windows tool recovering on the very same drive and that no one responded with some explanation... ive read everywhere that the win integrated tool serves the purpose of backing up when the drive is failing, but seems like i misunderstood, it seems it only backs up and restores the system to the backed up state, on the very same drive, which is pretty sad, just one little step and the tool would do everything what is important when something is failing... jeez, im really stunned... and im stunned more that i really googled for a long time and there is NO QUESTION like mine o_O

its like no one really cared where it restores, ever...