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I am upgrading the hard drive, from disk A (120 GB) to disk B (500 GB), in a laptop with Windows 7 professional.

This is what I did:

  1. Made a system image of A using the built in backup tool, saving it to B.
  2. Since I didn't have a third external disk, I copied the whole folder hierarchy, WindowsImageBackup and down, to a file server for temporarily storage
  3. Replaced A with B in the laptop
  4. Formatted both A and B (NTFS on both).
  5. Installed Windows 7 from DVD to B
  6. Copied the WindowsImageBackup to A.
  7. Booted from the Windows 7 install DVD.
  8. Selected Repair your computer (rather than Install now) in the installer and then Restore your computer...
  9. The restore program finds my WindowsImageBackup hierarchy (pro tip: you must disconnect/connect the external disk, otherwise the installer won't see your backup) and offers to use it to restore, which I accept. Then the restoration begins but after maybe a minute or so (this should take hours) it returns with an error message "The system image restore failed." and "Error detail: Recovery to the backup storage location is not allowed."

At step 9 there are three editable text fields, Date and time, Computer (which displays the name of the machine) and Drives to restore. The last field contains a search path \\?\\Volume{UUID}, C: (UUID is some long string with random characters). I interpret this as the source and destination drives/devices

I have spent a couple of hours googling but the suggestions I found mostly refers to either make sure that WindowsImageBackup is stored in the root of the drive (but that part - the installer being unable to find the backup - is a non-issue for me) or suggests re-imaging the source drive with some third party tools (but I have formatted the source drive so that is not an option).

I interpret the error message as that the installer tries to write the system image back to the external drive (A) rather than the new drive (B). However, when I run diskpart list volume at the command line the new drive is C while the old drive's main partition is F (it also has a small recovery partition, E). There is also D for the DVD-player.

The path I mentioned above indicates that the installer tries to restore the VHD to C, doesn't it?

So what do I do now?

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    What is the UUID of the disk that contains the recovery image? Does it match the UUID in the search path? Please edit your question instead of submitting a comment.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Dec 13, 2019 at 7:18
  • @Ramhound Where can I see the UUID of a disk?
    – d-b
    Commented Dec 13, 2019 at 8:31
  • @Ramhound This is weird. I read this question social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/… and tested running mountvol when booted into Windows. The four volumes connected had almost identical UUIDs, just the last two characters of the first group were different. Aren't UUIDs supposed to be (pseudo) random? And to answer your question (I will add it as an edit when I figure the whole thing out), the UUID displayed by the installer is completely different.
    – d-b
    Commented Dec 14, 2019 at 7:01

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