Restore Windows From Data Backup?

Question

So I managed to break my partition table, but I was able to recover my entire C: drive and copy every file and folder to an external drive. My question now becomes, is there anyway to, when I reinstall Windows, to restore from that backup (since it's just a data backup of files and folders, not a system image)? Would booting into linux (so that partition isn't in use by Windows) and simply copy-past-overwriting the old files effectively give me my system back?

Answer 1

Using another OS, like a linux live cd, or a different install of Windows, you can simply restore all of the files, yes.. at least assuming you did actually back them all up. If you did the backup while running windows, then it won't let you backup files that are in use, such as the registry hives.