Friday, October 28, 2011

Restoring A Windows 7 Backup To A New Hard Drive

A common scenario is to use the built-in Windows 7 Backup & Restore functionality to create a system image, then install a bigger hard drive and try to restore the image to the new hard drive.  When i tried to do this, i got the error:

No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found

A quick search showed me i was not alone - even if the destination drive was the same size or bigger, i still got the error.  Finally i found the following solution:

  1. Boot into the Windows 7 DVD
  2. Format the destination drive to a single, empty partition (you can do this through the Windows 7 installer 'Advanced options' dialog)
  3. Select 'repair my computer'
  4. Open the command prompt
  5. Type diskpart to start the disk partition tool
  6. Type select disk=0 to change to the destination drive
  7. Type detail disk to check the details of the drive and ensure it is the correct one.  If not, repeat steps 6 & 7 with a different index until the correct disk details are displayed
  8. Type clean to reset the disk
  9. Type exit to exit the diskpart tool
  10. Select Restore from a system image and follow the wizard
The restore process should now complete successfully.  I found the above steps from the accepted answer in this thread.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Pairing The Logitech m555b Bluetooth Mouse With Windows 7 x64

If you are unable to pair your bluetooth mouse (in my case the Logitech m555b) with Windows 7, try the following.  In my case, Windows could see the mouse but sat there spinning its wheels while trying to connect.  To get it to work, when it discovered the mouse and displayed it in the 'add device' dialog, i right-clicked the mouse, ticked 'Drivers for keyboard, mice, etc' which forced the HID drivers to be installed and the mouse started to work fine.  I then cancelled the 'add device' dialog as it continued to search for other devices. Let me know in the comments if it fixes your issue!  The below screenshot was taken from this thread.