If a major disaster occurs and you find you’re no longer able to boot into Windows 7, you may need to do a recovery. Today we take a look at restoring your Windows 7 machine using a System Repair Disc and a backed up system image.

Note: This article assumes you have already created a System Repair Disc and have created a system image in Windows 7.

If you can’t boot into Windows because of a hard drive failure or corrupt OS, you might want to restore your system using the most recent image versus a clean install. In this scenario we are assuming that we’ve exhausted every other option, and the only way to save our system is to restore it from an image.

Boot from System Repair Disc

First we need to boot from the System Repair Disc. Pop it in your CD drive and if the BIOS is already set to boot from CD-ROM first, then you will see the following screen. If you don’t see the Press any key to boot from CD or DVD message, then you’ll need to hit the correct key when booting to pull up the boot options screen and choose your CD / DVD Drive. Usually it’s F12 but each system varies, for instance on my IBM Thinkpad it’s a separate Access IBM button.

While the System Repair Disc starts up you will see the message Windows is loading files…

After that the System Recovery Options screen comes up. Here you want to choose the correct keyboard input and click Next.

System Recovery searches for the Windows installation(s) you have on the hard drive.