I used ImageX to apply a oem factory restore image to a hard drive. I placed the hard drive in a drive enclosure and used Diskpart to create two partitions on the drive. The first partition is a 300mb primary system partition formated to ntfs and set to active. The second partition is a primary partition formated to ntfs and uses up the rest of the drive. Searching the internet i found two commands to add or copy boot files to the hard dirve. The first one I tried was: z:\windows\system32\bcdboot z:\windows I assigned Z as the drive letter to the Windows partition. After executing the command it said the boot files were successfully created. When I installed the hard drive in the originally pc that had the recovery partition I get a message that says "An Operating System Wasn't Found". The second command I tried was D:\Boot\bootsect /nt60 Z: I placed a Windows 7 DVD in my DVD drive and used the command above. Again it said successfully created boot files or something to that effect but when I installed the drive in the pc, I got the message "An Operating System Wasn't Found" The two commands above added a boot entry as if I wanted to duel boot windows. I want to be able to place the hard drive in another computer and boot from there. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Just in case you were wondering why I am doing it this way is because the hard drive I'm using is smaller than the original. I used Dell's Data Safe to make a backup USB when I first got the computer. But when I tried to restore it using the USB I get a message that the hard drive has to be at least 780GB. Or some number close to that.
easybcd . deploy.. write MBR. make sure the boot folder is in active bootable part.. 300mb ? or in the main ntfs. boot win 7 recovery cd or setup and run repair. done or try bootrec /rebuildbcd
You probably need to specify where you want the boot files to go. Assign the 300mb Active Primary partition letter S then use "bcdboot z:\windows /s s:" BCDBoot also has other options like specifying mbr/uefi modes, languages, etc...
I would like to thank everyone who replied. I tried this first just because it seemed the easiest and it worked!! The factory restore image installed just fine and everything is working as it should. Life is good. The only reason I made the system partition 300mb is because that's how large it was on the original drive.