Image Restore failing on a UEFI system

Hi,

I have a UEFI based windows 7 machine, which had a 120gb SSD c: drive that died (nooo!). My D: drive has a system image backup and I also create a system repair disk (yaay!). However, I can't get them to work together to allow me to restore to a good old 400gb SATA drive replacing the C drive.

Here's what I try:

1. When I boot the PC in UEFI mode from the DVD drive (boot UEFI DVDRAM drive) with the repair disk, it just says "boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible"

2. When I boot the PC in BIOS mode from the DVD drive (boot DVDRAM drive) with the repair disk, it just says "non system disk"

3. When I boot the PC in UEFI mode off a Windows 7 install DVD and select "Repair your computer" it just says "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to Repair"

4. When I boot the PC in BIOS mode off a Windows 7 Install DVD, I get all the way through repair, selecting the image, then click restore and it says "Failed" "Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using EFI and this computer is using BIOS".

5. If I complete a UEFI install of Windows 7 from scratch, I can't restore the entire installation (only user files) from the original system image.

For I while I though UEFI was cool, but not so much now. Maybe I don't understand it. How can I get this stupid computer to restore from the system drive backup so I don't need to re-install every program and waste days of effort (and $$$ re-purchasing software licenses)?

Continue reading...