Monday, March 1, 2010

The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found (0x80042412)

Lesson learned from this one:

The key to this one is to keep in mind that it doesn't matter that the size of the image may be less than the drive you are restoring to.

What does matter is that the drive you are restoring TO has enough space to house the partition sizes of of the imaged OS.

In my case, the original OS looked like this:

Partition 0 100MB
Partition 1 575GB
Windows 7 Backup image 433GB

attemping to restore to a 500GB physical disk will throw the error stated in the title. I ended up procuring a 1TB disk and the restore is moving forward.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're absolutely right!!! Thanks, solved my problem!

Anonymous said...

You can right-click the volume in Winows' disk manager and choose shrink. If you can get it below the (formatted) size of the new drive it will work.

Shrink isn't very robust, but there are ways to help it, like turning off page file, system restore, indexing, and doing a disk clean up. The (application) event log gives you pointers to the file keeping it from shrinking further.

A lot of people are running into this issue now trying to replace a conventional HD with a smaller SSD.

Anonymous said...

Windows' built-in disk manager, I meant.