You would think that having done all the hard work of making a backup of your Hard Drive (Just in case), and having used the Vista tools to do a Complete HD backup, that dealing wit ha HDD failure would be a relatively simple affair. But if things are not perfect you might be surprised…

On the contrary, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you would think. To start with, I purchased a new 500gb hard drive. Connect it all up, and follow the instructions under repair.  Choose Complete System retore… but the new Hard Drive is not visible.

At this point you can close down the repair console, and go and choose to do a new install. When you do this you can partition and format a disk. Cancel the install, and go back to the repair menu, and the drive is not visible.

So you reboot, and choose repair and restore again, and this time it should work . Ok, the drive is visible, tick, and curiously the partition and format box is greyed out.  No sweat, but then the restore fails with an error and returns yo uto the repair menu.

Can’t hurt to try for a fourth time, so I choose a complete restore again, and this time the partition and format option is unticked and not greyed out. And the restore works.

Time for a new feature Microsoft, called pick a Hard Drive to restore to, and partition it, format it, and restore to it without any stress.

If you have had a similar issue let me know.