Friends, there are situations when it is impossible to restore the system using checkpoints. Yes, it is better to avoid such situations, but if it happened, then you need to somehow solve the problem.

And to make the decision simple, it is best to prepare for such a situation. Today I will tell you how to restore your computer from a system image.

A system image is an exact copy of system files, settings, and configurations.

In this case, as in the case of restoring from checkpoints, the system will “roll back” to the state recorded on the image. And accordingly, all settings of programs, system parameters and files located on the system drive (usually, this is the “C:\” drive) will be “rolled back”.

Why create a system image?

Consider this option, you downloaded a new game, installed it. At the end, the installation wizard asked you to reboot the system. The computer turned off and the OS does not boot anymore. What happened? A virus was built into the distribution kit of the program, which infected your system.

This can also happen when trying to download and install “cracked” software that Russian PC users love to use.

As a result, we get an inoperable system. This is where the pre-created OS image comes in handy. If you have such a disk, then system recovery will not cause you problems.

Create a disk with a system image

• 1. Click on the “Start” button in the lower left corner of the system desktop. In the menu that opens, select “Control Panel” of Windows 7. In the window that opens, find the “System and Security” section and click on the “Computer Data Backup” subsection.

• 2. In the window that opens, select the “Create a system image” item.

• 3. The System Image Wizard will start. Which prompts you to choose a location to save the archive. By default, the item “On DVDs” will be indicated. Leave this option and click the "Next" button.

• 4. The “Confirm backup settings” window will appear. After checking the specified parameters, click the “Activate” button.

After that, the process of preparing and creating the archive will begin. The progress of the process will be displayed as a filled colored bar.

• 4. During the process, the Wizard will prompt you to insert a blank media larger than 1 GB into the drive. The drive must already be formatted. You can do this in the "My Computer" window by right-clicking on the DVD drive. And in the menu that opens, select the item “Format ...”, or “Erase this disk”. And then the master will format it himself.

• 5. Next, the Wizard will start burning the created archive to a DVD. This process can take a significant amount of time.

Upon completion of this operation, a window will appear asking you to add disaster recovery information to the created disk. As we remember from the article “”, using the information written to the disk, it is possible to return the system to one of the states recorded in the form of a restore checkpoint.

• 6. After the Wizard finishes creating the system image, a window will open with a message that the system backup was successful.

• 7. Now the disk with the created system image can be removed from the drive and close the Wizard window by clicking the “Close” button.

So, Friends, the disk with the system image has been successfully created. We laid the straw. They insured themselves.

Restoring a system from a system image

Let's consider a situation where, as a result of a virus, our computer refuses to boot. Accordingly, there is neither an emergency recovery disk nor an installation disk with the OS at hand. But we prepared a disk image with the system in advance.

• 1. Reboot the computer by clicking on the “Reset” button, or by turning off and on the computer power again. When loading, press the “F8” key and go to the “Additional Boot Options” menu.

• 2. Select the "Computer troubleshooting" item and press the "Enter" key.
• 3. After that, the “System Recovery Options” window will be displayed with the choice of the required language for the recovery menu and keyboard options.

As a rule, there is no need to change anything here, just click the “Next” button.

• 4. Next, the “System Recovery Options” window will appear, in which you must specify the Username and password.

Specify the required Username, enter the password and click the “OK” button.

• 5. A window will open in which you will need to select the option to restore the system.

• 6. Next, insert the previously recorded DVD-ROM with the system image into the drive and click on the “Restore System Image” item. After a while, the system will find the image on the DVD and launch the Image Recovery Wizard. On the next two windows of the Wizard, click the “Next” button in sequence, leaving the proposed settings. And on the last window, click the “Finish” button.

• 7. After clicking the “Finish” button, the last window will appear with a warning that all data on the system disk will be replaced with data from the system image. Confirm your intention to restore the system from the image by clicking the "Yes" button.

After that, the Wizard will start the system recovery process, which will take a little time.

When the recovery process is complete, the PC will automatically restart. The operating system was restored from the image, all user data was saved, we did not touch them.

So we have completed the study of the issue of restoring a computer from a system image.

I am sure that now each of you will certainly create an image of the system. After all, they say correctly: “Trust in God, but don’t make a mistake yourself.”

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Restoring from an image means replacing all personal data on your hard drive with files from the image, or in other words, if you created an image of a local disk (C :) using the Data Archiving tool, then deploying this image in place, you will replace all your existing files on this disk with data from the image.
The article is written as a continuation, where we learned how to create an Image of the Windows 7 operating system in case of a serious malfunction, but here we will restore our data in place, even when our Windows 7 will not boot at all.

Restoring from an image

According to my observations, serious users install Windows 7 and divide the hard drive into two volumes and call them names, for example (C:) and (D:). On the drive (C:) they have the Windows 7 operating system, and on (D:) all personal data. Next, they create a disk image (C:) and save it on another partition of the hard drive, that is, on (D:). The disk (D :) is not archived, since according to users, it is usually rare with it, which happens and this is actually the case.

And then there was a problem with Windows 7, the system takes a long time to load, freezes and is unstable, our users, in the language of motorists, kick the wheels for a while (apply a rollback using restore points), but the car still does not drive, and Windows 7 does not work ok then they restore from image drive (C:) and a working Windows 7 from the archive replaces the inoperable one, that's all.
The most serious ones create an image of both the disk (C:) containing the files of the operating system, and the disk (D:) with personal data. You may notice, if you have one hard drive, where then to store the image of two partitions (C:) and (D:)? For this, an additional SATA hard drive or a portable USB hard drive is specially purchased, which must be formatted in the NTFS file system. Restore your data from the image in this case, you need to be careful, along with the faulty Windows 7 located on the disk (C :), you can replace all your files on the disk (D :), so you first need to copy everything you need, for example, to the same portable USB hard drive .
All this is written and shown in the article Creating a system image, now let's restore.

• Note: how to create and how to use a Recovery Drive, you can learn from our article How to restore a Windows 7 system. Also in this case, the Windows 7 installation disk can help, it also contains the recovery environment.

So I'll show you how to restore Windows 7 from an image using a recovery disc. We insert it into the drive, reboot, the BIOS should be set to boot from the drive, then the System Recovery Options program starts.

We quickly press Enter, otherwise the offer to boot from the disk will disappear.

The recovery environment starts, again you need to select the keyboard layout,

usedownload the latest system image and our Windows 7 is restored.
The system image is always created with the extension vhd and is in the folder Windows Image Backup.

To use a system image as a simple hard disk partition, for example, we need to extract some file from the image, and not restore the entire image, we just need to connect our image as a virtual hard disk in Disk Management.

Start->Computer->right-click and select Manage->Disk Management->Action->Attach VHD from the context menu,

Our image is being converted into a simple hard drive accessible in the Computer window.

Disadvantages of the System Imaging tool: You cannot set up automatic archiving without the help of additional software.
How to transfer an installed Windows 7 system to another computer.

Agree, as soon as the time comes to reinstall the system, you begin to think about the various programs and drivers that you will have to install again and again after installing clean Windows. I suggest not to torture your brain and just once create a system image from which you can easily and quickly install Windows 7 with all the necessary software.

Personally, for myself, I realized a long time ago that deploying an iso image of Windows 7 with all programs and drivers is much easier than periodically installing a new system with all packages. The regular application Backup and Restore Windows 7 allows you to create an image of a system disk with all programs and drivers.

Why do I need to create an iso image of the system?

1. If you suddenly decide to reinstall the system, you will not need a Windows 7 installation disc.

2. You don't need to reinstall all drivers.

3. There is no need to download and install all the software again.

How to create a Windows 7 system image?

I would recommend creating an iso image immediately after reinstalling Windows 7 and installing all drivers and software on the system. As a result, when you decide to recover from the image, you will have the cleanest Windows with all the programs, and extra garbage. And the image itself will weigh much less, because there will be no computer games, temporary files, downloaded files from the Internet, and other nonsense on the disk.

1. Launch the Backup and Restore application. Start->My Programs->Maintenance->Backup and Restore.

3. Select the disk on which the image will be saved. I recommend saving the image either on an external USB drive (flash drive or hard drive) or on a second hard drive partition. If you have only one disk in your system, be sure to use the article.

4. Now it remains to click the "Archive" button. In the figure you can see exactly how many gigabytes of information the archive will contain. The ISO file will turn out to be very large, since I have not reinstalled the system on my laptop for almost 2 years. Yes, there are a lot of documents.

5. We are waiting for the system to complete the Archiving. By the way, archiving 56 gigabytes was performed in only 30 minutes, pretty good.

After the system has created the image, you will be prompted to create a recovery disk. Don't postpone this task until after a major system failure. Just click the Yes button and follow the short instructions.

The system image will be stored in the "WindowsImageBackup" folder with the following structure.

How to create a bootable usb floppy

The recovery disk is needed in case you lose access to the Windows 7 shell, for example, due to a virus attack or accidental deletion of system files. Thanks to the floppy disk, you can restore Windows using the created image. If you skipped the step of creating such a disk, follow my instructions (opens in a new window).

How to restore Windows 7 from an image

You can restore the system from scratch using a special disk that we created a little higher. We insert a USB flash drive or CD / DVD blank, and follow the further instructions.

1. We restart the computer, and press F8 on the keyboard, we need the recovery floppy to boot. Usually F8 or F12 loads a list of devices from which you can boot to the Windows shell. You need to select a device with a recovery disk, in my case it is a DVD drive with the letter G. Alternatively, or.

2. If the recovery disk is running, the following picture will open before us.

4. Now we can either select the image manually or use the latest available one. I decided to choose the second item to check.

5. Select an image from the list, click the left mouse button, and then click the next button.

6. On the new page, click the "Next" button again.

7. If there is a desire to format the hard drive, you will need to install special drivers, and check the box next to formatting. Or just click the Next button.

8. Well, that's practically all. It remains to click the Finish button, and wait until the system image is unpacked on your hard drive.

Good afternoon!

This instruction is about how to restore Windows (7, 8, 10) from a previously created full system image.

If you need to create a Windows system image, go to:

Restoring a Windows System Image

Go to the "Troubleshooting" section.

3. Now go to the "System Image Recovery" section:

4. After that, the computer will restart and you will need to log in with your Windows account:

5. The next window is "Selecting a system image for recovery". Insert a DVD disc or flash drive (flash drive), Windows itself will find the latest image. If it doesn't, make the selection manually.

6. Now you can choose additional options for recovering from an image. If you check the "Format and partition disks" checkbox, then all data on your computer or laptop will be deleted. If the checkbox is left unchecked, only the C:\ drive will be deleted.

7. In the final window, click the "Finish" button, after which the process of restoring from the image will begin. Please note that the process can no longer be stopped or canceled:

During the recovery process, the computer may restart several times. In addition, the process itself can take from 10 minutes to several hours, be prepared to wait.

If the process is interrupted or fails, you can try again, but use a different Windows image.

In Windows 8.1 (at least in the currently officially available distribution of Windows 8.1 Preview), Microsoft decided to abandon the graphical Windows 7 backup tool left over from the days of Windows 7.

In the recently leaked Windows 8.1 RTM network, a graphical wizard for creating a system image still appeared. Details at the end of the article.

Naturally, this does not mean that in Windows 8.1 it is impossible to create a system image backup using standard tools (do not confuse system image backup and user data backup technology), it's just that now this functionality has been transferred to a separate Wbadmin command line utility and is not available from GUI. In this article, we will talk about the features of using the Wbadmin utility to create a backup copy of a Windows 8.1 image and then restore the system from this image.

Backing up the Windows 8.1 image

The operating system image takes up a lot of disk space, so to perform the operation, you must have enough free space (no less than the size of the occupied space on the system disk) on some external drive (for example, with a USB connection) or a network directory.

- quiet– when executing the command, do not ask the user for confirmation

In the event that it is necessary to include several disk partitions in the backup (for example, C:\, E:\ and F:\), the command will look like this:

WbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:H: -include:C:,E:,F: -allCritical –quiet

If you want to write the backup to a shared network folder:

WbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:\\srv-bak1\BackupFolder -user:username -password:userPassword -include:C: -allCritical -quiet

Note: If authorization is required to access the network folder, enter the user name and password

Depending on the number of disks, the degree of their fullness and the performance of the computer, the process of creating a system image can take several hours (in this example, with 40 GB of information on the C:\ drive, the system backup took about 2 hours).

If, after the backup has been created, you open the drive (or network directory) to which it was written in Explorer, you can find the WindowsImageBackup directory familiar from the days of Windows 7 (Backup and Restore function) with several .xml and .vhdx files in it. These are files with system partition images and configuration information.

How to restore Windows 8.1 from an image

Attention: When restoring from a backup, all data on the partition being restored will be deleted and replaced with the data contained in the backup.

System Image Backup in Windows 8.1

Update from 09/06/2013.After getting acquainted with the recently "leaked" Windows 8.1 RTM (build 9471), we managed to find out that Microsoft decided to return the graphical interface for managing the creation of a backup copy of the entire contents of the computer. This function is called System Image Backup. To create a complete system image in Windows 8.1 (including system partitions