My iMac was one of those suffering from a faulty Seagate HDD, and it failed a few weeks ago. In anticipation of getting it repaired at the Apple Store, I was able to clone the OS X partition easily using Carbon Copy Cloner, but was having a lot of pain cloning the Windows partition. In the end, I was merely able to copy all of the files off the drive onto an external drive with a FAT32 partition. Now that the hard drive has been swapped, I now want to restore my installation of Windows 7.
The first thing I tried was to boot from the Windows 7 DVD, reformatting the (new, internal) Bootcamp partition and use robocopy (in a Command Window) to copy the files from the (external) USB drive to the internal drive. But this doesn't work, as I can't boot off the resulting drive. If I then boot from the Windows 7 DVD again and run the disk repair tool (or whatever it's called), it will "repair" my disk. This results in (A) having 3 different "Windows 7 (recovered)" options listed when I try to boot of the drive, the first two being non-functional but the third working, (B) the partition no longer readable by OS X (doesn't appear on Desktop, and shows up as a ghosted entry like "disk0s4"), (C) when the Windows partition eventually boots, it has four different "desktop.ini" files open in four different Notepads.
Obviously I would like to have my Windows installation back, but not if it means (A) not being able to boot into Windows without manually selected the magical third option (B) not being able to read from the partition in OS X (C) always having tons of crap files open every time I log into my account.
Is there any way to get my Windows 7 Bootcamp partition back, given all I have is a backup drive containing the files (not a block-cloned copy)?
(I'm also happy to boot from a gparted/clonezilla Live USB install if those tools are appropriate.)