So, in Windows 7 RC I can make a backup successfully on my USB 2.0 500 GB HDD connected to a USB 2.0 port direct on my PC. System Image backup completes successfully.Now I'm trying to restore the image on the same computer, but on a new hard drive. The original hard drive was a 750 GB SATA but was using only 100 GB of space. I want to restore the image to my new 500 GB SATA HDD. I took out the old HDD, installed my new one into the same and booted with my Windows 7 DVD. I chose Repair and went through the steps to restore the system image backup.It finds my new HDD successfully, I choose to restore the image backup, and as soon as it starts it says:The system image restore failed. Error: Error details: The parameter is incorrect.(0x80070057)I have tried formatting my external backup HDD and made a new system image from scratch. Same error when trying to restore it.Is it true you can't restore from a USB HDD? If so, why let me backup to it in the first place? I don't know what to do. This just means since Windows 7 came out in beta stages, my backups must not have been restorable all this time. Scary.Or is it true I can't restore to a new HDD? What if my old HDD had died?Any ideas? The last time I successfully restored was from an internal SATA HDD on Vista, and I restored to the same HDD on which Vista was originally installed on as my installation became corrupt. The restore was perfectly successful.

This problem should be fixed in the RC, but apparently is not. See: http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/common-causes-and-solutions-to-backup-system-restore-and-complete-pc-backup-problems.aspx, referring to Vista Complete Backup (what's nearly the same like "Backup personal folders and system image" in Windows 7).Mobile AMD64 3000+, VIA Apollo K8T800 chipset, 1 G RAM, ATIRadeonMobility 9700, 20x DVDRW, C:XPSP3 (55G),D:WIN7 (25G),F:DATA (250G)

I know the above has been confusing. To sum it up, I couldn't restore my system image backup from a USB HDD. But it worked successfully when I tried it in another USB port and had the HDD plugged in before starting the PC. Then my main question was, does Windows 7 restore a system image onto a new unformatted HDD of another make or model? Well I've just tried it now and I know the above has been confusing. To sum it up, I couldn't restore my system image backup from a USB HDD. But it worked successfully when I tried it in another USB port and had the HDD plugged in before starting the PC. Then my main question was, does Windows 7 restore a system image onto a new unformatted HDD of another make or model? Well I've just tried it now and it worked.Verdict: To restore a Windows 7 System image from a USB HDD onto a new HDD of any make and model, ensure the HDD is definately plugged into a USB 2.0 port.Even though mine was before, but sometimes my USB 2.0 ports play up and act like USB 1.1 ports. But that's probably just for me...

Hi nLinked, I'm going through the exact same thing! My MBR is on a RAID0 set so I decided to try and do something about it finally. The RAID set held Vista, which I can live with losing now, but I installed W7 on an extra 750G sata. I booted into W7, created a system backup with only the W7 partitions off the 750G. I then fitted a new 1TB drive (I have no idea why we need these size drives these days but what the heck...), installed W7 on it in order to create a new boot record. Now I want to get everything back how it was using the image on my external drive. I insert the created DVD and it boots up correctly but when I select the image restore all I get is 'The image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found.' I got drastic and removed all the partitions on the 1TB using DISKPART, but no joy. Hmmmmmm I guess I'm stuck with the 750G Samsung which I think is starting to fail..... I'll try again tomorrow.

Hi nLinked,I'm going through the exact same thing!My MBR is on a RAID0 set so I decided to try and do something about it finally. The RAID set held Vista, which I can live with losing now, but I installed W7 on an extra 750G sata. I booted into W7, created a system backup with only the W7 partitions off the 750G.I then fitted a new 1TB drive (I have no idea why we need these size drives these days but what the heck...), installed W7 on it in order to create a new boot record. Now I want to get everything back how it was using the image on my external drive.I insert the created DVD and it boots up correctly but when I select the image restore all I get is 'The image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found.' I got drastic and removed all the partitions on the 1TB using DISKPART, but no joy. HmmmmmmI guess I'm stuck with the 750G Samsung which I think is starting to fail.....I'll try again tomorrow. I think I can help with the The image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found error. Happened to me so many times and then I found out why.Although you made a recovery disc, I havea strong feeling that when you boot the computer, the recovery environment is loading from your hard drive. Have you by any chance got a HDD in there with the Windows 7 files on it at the same time as the recovery CD, but your BIOS is loading the HDD first?Going back a bit, you said you tried to load Win7 on the drive to make the boot loader. You don't need to do this. Ensure the 1 TB HDD is blank, unformatted. Ensure bothHDDs are connected.Boot with the DVD only (set your DVD drive as the first boot device, and unplug any USB drives), and use that to restore the system image to the new drive.

I recently ran into a similar issue. A few months ago, I bought a new PC. Then a couple of weeks ago my HDD started making some alarming clicking noises and I got the company I bought the PC from to send me a replacement drive. I used Windows 7's image backup feature to copy what was on my old HDD to the new one and it worked great. Then, about a week ago, I decided to invest in a SSD in the hopes of being able to avoid the mechanical failures that tend to plague standard HDDs. So, when I got my new SSD a few days ago, I tried going through the same process of using Windows 7's image backup to copy what was on my old HDD to the new one. However, this time around, when I went to restore the image, I got a fairly generic error message along the lines of not being able to find an appropriate drive to restore to. After some research, I came across this thread here and it looks like the problem is that, despite the backup image only being 145 GB, I can't restore it because my old HDD is 1 TB and my new one is only 240 GB. I then tried using some third party software to clone my old HDD to the new one, but that didn't work either because when I boot off the SSD, Windows 7 says it's not a "genuine" copy and won't run properly. I'm a software engineer who works from home and a PC gamer, so, I have a fair amount of software installed on my PC and I really don't want to re-install everything. But, at this point, it looks like my only option may be to use my system restore discs to get my new SSD to a "factory default" state then spend several days re-installing all of my software. Someone please tell me I'm wrong.

I got the error message "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found" when trying to use Windows backup to move my 40GB Windows 7 partition from a 500GB HDD to a 120GB SSD. I finally resolved the issue by installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the SSD, but without activation. Then I used the restore tab in disk utility on a Mac and a couple of external firewire enclosures to replace the new Windows 7 partition on the SSD with my old Windows 7 partition on the HDD. I left the new "System Reserved" partition on the SSD alone. After booting into my old Windows 7 partiton on the SSD, I went to activate windows, just to make sure I don't run into the same issue speedy7878 had with activation, and it told me that activation was successful. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I've found a solution to a similar problem. My situation: Replaced my 80gb HDD in my laptop with a 60gb SSD. I created a backup system image from the 80gb and tried to restore it to the 60gb using the win7 installation CD. I always arrived at the "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found". Solution: Replaced the 80gb hard drive and created a new system back up image, however, fist I did this: Go to Control Panel -> Administrative tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management Right-click on your C:drive, or whatever the 2nd Partition is (not the 100mb system reserved partition is) and select "shrink volume" Using this utility, shrink the volume of your second partition to less than that of the disk that you will be recovering your system to. This should enable your system to be restored to a disk smaller than the original disk. Once you've recovered your system, you can go to Disk Management again and Expand the volume to get all of your disk space back. Hope this helps others.

Hi, You have to shrink ALL your partitions such that the total size is less than the size of your destination disk. W7 image restore would restore the partition table and check to make sure that the partition table make sense for the new drive. I did a blog post about this http://goo.gl/xypD0 HTH

I have a notebook which came with a 500GB 5400rpm drive. After almost a year's use, I found I used only about 25GB with almost 450GB free space. I bought a 64GB SSD and try to transport the Win7 from 500GB to 64GB SSD. I used BACKUP and RESTORE, It failed as expected. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found. After read the articles in this forum, I did: 1. I shrink 500GB to 25GB, backup to a 60GB USB HD and created a repair disc (CD). 2. After Backup completed, I extend the 25GB back to 500GB. I found the C: drive has no "active", so I set it active. 3. Shutdown, replace 500GB to this brand new 64GB SSD. Insert repair disc, connect USB HD. Try to restore, failed as before, No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found. 4. Put the 500GB back to the system. Now, it won't boot - BOOTMGR is missing. This is disaster.

Not exactly the same scenario but.... I was trying to restore a 40GB IDE to a 150GB SATA with Windows 7 and was getting the "The system image restore failed No disk that can be used for recovering the system can be found" error message. I spent heaps of time messing around with this and what worked for me was to run "clean" on the disk to be imaged. I did this in the "diskpart" utility from a command prompt while in repair. After this I successfully restored to the new disk. Here's a link for some more info on the DISKPART utility : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(v=ws.10).aspx