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I have an unfragmented raw image of my laptop's hard drive stored on an external hard drive (created with ftk imager which just makes a raw .001 file, not through windows to make a .iso file). My laptop's hard drive has failed. I have replaced my laptop's hard drive with an identical one. But I haven't been able to figure out how to actually get the image from the external drive onto the new laptop drive. Here's what I have tried:
1) I have booted the laptop with a windows repair disk. I can navigate to the external drive through the command prompt, but the window's repair utility cannot get to the external drive; prompts lead to a request to install drivers. Standalone Drivers are not available for my external drive--they seem to only be incorporated into executables.
2) I have plugged the new hard drive and the external hard drive into a third computer. I can see that both the raw image and the new drive are the same size. But the new drive was formatted, so I can't just move the raw image onto the new drive--I get a warning about needed around 100 MB more space.
Any help or points to other posts are appreciated. Searches so far lead me to cloning, the window's recover option, or linux recover. I might not be using the correct search terms. If there are simple commands that accomplish this from the dos command prompt accessible from the windows repair cd boot, that would be great to know also.
That software is for computer forensics, not intended as a image backup to restore an image. – Moab – 2015-09-29T21:03:31.933
So am I out of luck? I was hoping there was a way to write the raw image to the new drive and have the computer recognize it as the bootable drive through use of the command prompt (i.e., without other special utility programs). – Docuemada – 2015-09-29T21:55:09.053
Looks like you have a possible answer below. – Moab – 2015-09-29T23:46:05.813