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It did give an error code. 0x80042412
It does mention USB disks, so it's possible that is causing the issue. Follow Step 2 in the error message and try again.
The size of disk should not matter.
I figured you weren't using Acronis TI. That's what I use, so I have more experience with that than the Win7 restore.
Good catch - I didn't realize that was the error code. Thing is, I didn't have any USB disks attached to the computer when trying to do the reimage, so I wasn't sure what it was complaining about. I also made sure to unplug all USB devices except the keyboard & mouse. The only USB devices showing at boot-up were 2 from the front card readers (which were empty). Just to double check, I unplugged the front card reader cables - this time it only showed the DVD and new hard disk at boot-up. Yet I still get the same error. :(
Only reason I mention size of the drive is that when I searched some people said the Win7 restore was temperamental that way. And even the full factory restore from the 3 DVDs wouldn't work - they installed successfully but upon boot-up I just got a black screen with flashing cursor in upper left. I have no idea if this has anything to do with it. I will exchange the 500 GB drive today for a 1TB which matches the original one and see if that works. I did install Linux Mint to an external hard drive via USB and that's working smoothly so far. I'm using that to type here. :) But this indicates to me that overall the computer seems to be in okay condition.
Worse comes to worse, I suppose I could buy a straight copy of WIn7 and just install that - it shouldn't have any of these issues.
All fixed now! :) Returned the 500 GB drive and got a 1 TB drive to match what was in there. And Windows System Restore didn't bat an eye! Took a while, but in the end my computer was up & running!
Makes me wonder if getting something like Acronis TI instead of relying on Windows System Image is worth it.
Thanks again for the help! :)
Interesting. Acronis doesn't have that limitation. Like I said, I don't use Win7 system restore. The latest Acronis is a bit bloated for me, but it is a much more mature product.
I don't have much experience in this except to be doing regular Win7 system image backups. But yes, in this case it sure seemed like not having a matching drive capacity was giving errors. It just so happened that the 1 TB drive I purchased was nearly identical to what was in there - I'm not sure if changing brands but still having 1 TB size would also have had problems.
I was also disappointed that the factory recovery DVDs wouldn't work on the 500 GB drive. As I said above, it installed without any errors at all but simply would not boot. Seems like it too is highly dependent on the new drive being identical. I never tried to use this on the 1 TB drive since the system image restore worked. But my guess is that the factory recovery would have worked fine on the 1 TB drive.
I'll look into Acronis and maybe some competing products too but something that is more robust than Win7 default.