Hard Drive Image

[JO53PHS]

So my hard drive recently failed after 2 months of use, but I was lucky enough to get a warning message from Windows about it, so I had a chance to backup a few files / make a drive image. My new HDD is arriving on Monday and after I've put that in I'll reinstall Windows on it.

What I was wondering is when I restore the drive image, will my Windows files be overwritten/modified in some way? Or does this largely depend on the software used to create the disc image?

I just wanted to ask so I didn't somehow mess up my windows installation. I've never needed to make a drive image before so this is the first time I've done it, and I've probably missed something out or done something wrong along the way. Just to clarify, what I have at the moment is a ~55 GB .arc file (created with R-Drive) on an external Hard Drive.

If all else fails I can just reinstate my files & programs manually (since it was a new computer I didn't have a huge amount of stuff on there anyway). Please do excuse my computational incompetence

 

[vanthus]

Dont know much about R-Drive,but it looks pretty complicated.
If you still can,make a system image with windows7 own program in backup and restore.
I did this when my first hard drive was failing & it restored everything to exactly as it was on the new hard drive without a hitch.

 

[onlynik]

It all depends onthe software, but I've used the Acronis one, too an hour to copy a 250GB HD. Not too bad.

 

[JO53PHS]

Thanks for your advice.. I'll probably make an image using Windows if I need to do so in future, but R-Drive seemed to work fine on this occasion.

Just fitted the new HDD this evening, reinstalled windows, installed R-Drive and restored the image. Worked great apart from one corrupt windows file (which seems to have been fixed by chkdsk)