Restoring Windows7 from an Image backup

Problem:
Unable to restore from a Windows7 Image Backup

Solution:
The image backup files have to be in a particular folder: :\WindowsImageBackup\\ in order for the Recovery CD to find them.

Story:
So Office 2013 gets released and we are testing it on a small case study group here in the office. 5 users volunteered to be in the test group. On the final machine, the upgrade fails with an odd error. We gave the user a spare machine so she could keep working. We made a Windows7 Image backup of the machine and spent the next day fighting what ended up being a corrupt install DVD. Once we figured out that the Office 2013 media had become bad, we needed to restore her machine back to how it was before we re-loaded it (assuming the original office install was corrupt). We go to restore from a Windows7 image, and it did not detect the backup we had made. Rather than panic, we can see that the .vhd backups of the drives are there on the USB Hard Drive we used. After a bit of searching we read an article that says to do an image backup from a baseline install and then put our backup in that directory. This worked like a champ.

For Windows7’s restore it looks in the :\WindowsImageBackup directory for machine names, and then finds backups. If you save the Image to another folder name, the system won’t find it. Thought I would share, as this was an interesting nut to crack.