Trials of an early adopter: Windows 7 System Imaging

[MLS]

Just wanted to post a pretty ridiculous experience with Win7 that may help other people who plan on using the system image feature built into Win7. Traditionally I am NEVER an early adopter where software is concerned.

Anyway, it all started when I went to fresh install Windows 7 from the retail disc, finally retiring XP. Install went alright until the first reboot, at which point AHCI failed to detect my hard drive. Assuming the hard drive just bit it out of some kind of heavenly vengeance for ignoring that girl scout in front of the grocery store, I sent it back for an RMA.

A few days later, my new drive arrives. I install it, reinstall Windows 7, everything works. My plan was to get Windows installed, configured with all the updates, drivers, and software I use on a daily basis, activate Windows, then image it so I can revert to a clean configured image whenever I want. Sounds good right?

After configuring everything, I began the image process, and it began properly, but I remembered I hadn't yet activated Windows. I wanted to activate as few times as possible as I know you have to start calling them after so many activations, so I canceled the image creation, and activated Windows.

I then went back to begin the image process yet again. This time, it errored. The error was that I needed at least 50MB free on all partitions in order for the image to create properly. Why? I have no idea, but that is what MS demands. Unfortunately, the partition it had a problem with was the 100MB partition Windows 7 creates for recovery purposes. Somehow in activating, this partition grew to 62MB/100MB full, rendering imaging impossible.

After some google research, I found a thread that detailed how to shrink the main partition, create a new recovery partition from the newly freed space, and activate it as the recovery partition. The final step of which is to reboot (of course). I follow the steps and everything is working swimmingly, that is until I reboot, and what's this? AHCI is not detecting my hard drive anymore.

Knowing that it would have been a very difficult to swallow coincidence for two drives to die in the same manner one after another, I began doing more research, leading me to a thread with a bunch of ASUS motherboard owners who were complaining that AHCI fails to detect their drive after being partitioned by Vista, which appears to be some kind of ASUS BIOS bug, which I could not workaround by trying many different BIOS versions for my board.

Luckily, I was able to unplug the drive, set the BIOS back to IDE emulation mode, replug the drive, and have it detect fine. Not wanting to be without NCQ, however, I decided I would just retry the installation. I booted into the windows installer, deleted the partitions, rebooted, switched back to AHCI, and the drive detected fine. Reinstalled windows, everything is good... except that the system partition is still 100MB and I still haven't solved that problem. Fortunately this time, I had the foreknowledge to create a 300mb partition at the beginning of the disk that I planned to merge with the 100MB autocreated one. I then went through the steps to resize the partition, rebooted and crossed my fingers... success! Everything worked great!

Happy, but still wary, I decided I would test to make sure that the actual re-imaging would work properly when needed. I open the image restore control panel app, and tell it that it's ok to reboot into recovery mode to restore the image. The computer says, "Nope.". "What?", I say, "I am the boss of you, not the other way around," and click again. "Nope" yet again.

"Fine," I say, and reboot off of the recovery disc, which has the ability to restore from image as well. Upon booting, it detects my windows installation, and tells me there was a small problem with the boot settings and asks if I want to repair. I don't, knowing I'm just going to reimage it, and if it doesn't work I don't want it screwing with what I know is at least a working installation. I get into selecting the image, I give it the network drive path, and what's this, I get an "internal error occurred enumerating backup images".

In a near bloodrage, I reboot into Windows and try the regular method of rebooting into recovery mode. "Nope". Ok, I reboot off of the recovery disc for one last try. This time, I let it repair whatever boot issues it found. It makes me reboot again. I do, and boot off of the recovery cd again. I get to the image selection, enter the network path, close my eyes and like that scene in Christmas Vacation, slowly lower my finger down on the mouse button. Open my eyes and voila! The image appears!

The imaging goes smoothly, and I reboot into a working system. Apparently whatever voodoo I did in making a bigger recovery partition, it screwed with the partition table in a way that somehow someway would not let me browse system images.

The end.

Long story short: wait for SP1 to do anything out of the ordinary.