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Restore Image file

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I have created an image file for a complete hard drive, hopefully including the XP op sys. It is on a second hard drive in the computer. The first hard drive has crashed and is inaccessible, how do I extract the data from the image file to make the second drive as the first was when the image file was made???

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You don't, at least not easily. The typical way to Restore is to install a new drive in place of the failed one, and then boot from a Recovery CD and do a Restore from your 2nd drive to the newly installed 1st.

But alternatively you could copy the image from the 2nd drive to another drive e.g. external USB, and then boot from the Recovery CD and Restore the image file from the USB drive back-onto the 2nd drive to make it "look like" the failed 1st.

In either case of course you need another drive to work with (assuming the 1st drive is dead i.e. can't be re-used, which you'd usually confirm by running Manufacturer-recommended diagnostics on it).

You could have cloned the first drive to the second and then removed one of them from the machine before booting up into windows (windows won't allow two boot drives on one machine and will mark one of them as not a boot drive so you can't have both onthe machine after cloning), then it work like the first but there are a number fo disadvantages to doing that, not least of whci is the risk of clone the wrong drive and ending up with two blank disks and no way to go back.

Get yourself a portable drive and save all your backups there. Then you will always have a means to restore even if one of the backups gets corrupted.