Here is the hardware/software scenario: Lenovo Laptop with Windows 7 Pro installed Seagate Freeagent Desk External USB Drive with Windows system backup image. The original hard drive is being used to restore to and no other hardware component has been added/replaced. The original retail Windows 7 Pro installation CD or DVD has been lost. The Win7 pro installation became corrupted and "System Retore" failed to bring the computer back to normal. Tried to reimage the computer using the Windows system image backup on the external drive, but the Windows restore utility can't automatically find or see the image files on the external drive, however, it CAN read the external drive. The reason I know it can read the external drive is that when you go to the command line in the system restoration options menu, you can read the files/folders on that drive. Also, when the restoration utility gives you the option of selecting an image on a network share or loading a driver for an external device and you select the latter, you can see the external drive listed and can expand/contract the files and perform various functions on them via a right mouse button click. I've tried copying the system image to the root of the external drive per one suggestion, but that hasn't helped. Seagate doesn't have a specific driver for the external drive because it uses the Windows 7 driver. (I don't think the drive is the issue anyhow based on what I've noted above about the utility being able to see the drive's folders and files) How do I force the Windows 7 system restoration utility to pick the system image and restore this drive? I'm also going to post this question to the "Answers" forum so I can hopefully get this system restored. Thank you,

Your Lenovo laptop should have a Recovery partition and your User manual should have instructions on how to activate the system Recovery. If you cannot find it in your User manual, check the Lenovo Support forums or contact the Lenovo Technical Support. Since most laptop now come with the Recovery partition you probably never received a Windows 7 DVD with your system.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Yes it does have a recovery partition, however it is for Vista. This PC was upgraded from Vista to 7, but a full retail version disk was used. I had thought about restoring it back to Vista, but the user wants 7 installed and the backups he did were in 7. I guess I could run the Vista thing by him, but he has said he is willing to wait to get 7 back on and I didn't want to spend time any more time than necessary. We've also pulled critical data from the drive and backed it up on to an external drive using Ubuntu so we really aren't losing anything except the operating system and time. I was hoping somebody (hello MS?) would have an answer to simply restore from the image already made. At this point we will probably just purchase another seat of Win7 Pro unless we can find the original disk.