How to restore from clone made to USB drive
The background on my problem is that I had done a cloned drive using a USB drive (cloned my Windows 7 Lenovo laptop drive). Acronis allowed me to do this with no warnings that I can recall.
But now I can't clone it back to the laptop drive.
The Lenovo laptop has its own recovery partition which I assume should have been cloned as well.
A few months later, the Lenovo drive boot sector must have gotten damaged. I was loading a Lenovo update when the crash occurred. The computer would not boot since that time. I tried to restore using Acronis and it was not successful. I was told by Acronis that I should have removed the drive from the Lenovo laptop and put a new drive in the laptop and cloned to that drive from the original drive which should have been put in an external USB drive housing. Well that was WAY too late to hear that advice!
So then I reloaded the operating system on the Lenovo laptop using their Lenovo recovery disks. It now boots to the Windows 7 operating system. Lenovo creates a "Q" partition that is called Lenovo_Recovery as well as the standard "C" partition with the bootable operating system.
I can plug in the "cloned" USB drive and I now see an the following partitions and labels on that drive:
"E" WD Smartware
"F" System Drive
"G" Windows7_OS
Since it is a Western Digital USB Drive, the E: partition seems to have the WD drive software in its own partition that the cloning process by Acronis did not touch. The F: partition seems to be the clone of the Lenovo Recovery partition The G: partition contains the operating system, all the applications and data files THIS IS WHAT I AM TRYING TO RECOVER
So, how can I do this. All the files seem to be there, but the files, registry and operating system files must be cloned back to the C: drive and be bootable.
Can I get some clear step-by-step guidance on this? This is very time critical since I travel a lot and will be leaving the country again in two days. Please respond as soon as possible if you have any ideas and guideance. Thanks very much.
In order to get the cloned drive back into your machine you will have to swap the cloned drive with the original. Cloning is intended for a drive replacement.
The best way to do what you want is to make a backup image of the old drive and restore that to your laptop. See Grover's Index http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3426 section 3 for guides that explain how to accomplish this task.
General idea is the following - install true image again, create a partition backup of the main (windows7_os) partition from the USB drive to somewhere else (may be first to the local drive, then copy .tib file to another usb drive), then boot from bootable CD that can be created with bootable media builder or downloaded from your account, boot from it, then recover this archive to the existing main windows partition (it may have other drive letter under bootable media, but the same volume label). Uncheck 'make it active' or whatever 'active' flag is there (it may be on by default but hidden in options).
Screenshot of Windows disk management window with that cloned usb drive plugged would be nice if I missed something.