Windows 10: I installed new SSD on laptop. Prior to that I created a recovery image on an external hard...

I installed a new SSD in laptop. Prior to that I created a recovery image to external hard drive. Laptop will not recognize boot device. I’ve been through all the boot options. If I need to install a new OS, how?

:)

 

Installing Drivers in Recovery M4 SSD

I can't seem to figure out how to install drivers so that can copy my system image to new laptop hard drive. I went as far as to install a new inactivated windows 7 onto the hard drive so I know it works, but when I point recovery at C:\Windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys, I got an error something along the lines of "not relevant to system hardware" (or something like that I forget the exact wording).

I can list the drive in diskpart, and I made sure it is not excluded for copying the image, but after 3 days of fiddling, I still can't get it to work. Where is the driver that I need for recovery to be able to install an image to the new hard drive? I checked crucial website, but they don't seem to list drivers for M4. I assume that since I was able to install a fresh inactivated Windows 7 from a startup disk that the driver I need would be somewhere in that system so maybe I'm just pointing recovery at the wrong file?

 

System Image on new SSD

Recently my HDD failed in my laptop, I had previously created a system image on an external hard drive and a repair disk on a DVD. I created the system image in a subfolder of the external drive as it contains multiple system images for different computers.
I have a new SSD that I am installing in place of my failed HDD, I have tried booting with the repair disk and recovering my system image to the new SSD without success, and just tried using AOMEI partition assistant but from what I can see, this software
only installs current OS onto new SSD. I am using a second laptop and want to transfer/recover the system image from my external drive to the new SSD, any ideas on using AOMEI, other software, or figuring out how to properly do this using Windows recovery?

 

Removing laptop hard drive and replacing with SSD?

You don't need to do a clean install. I would do this:

1. Use Reflect to image all partitions to an external drive and create a Reflect USB boot drive
2. Remove the hard drive and install the SSD
3. Boot to the Reflect recovery drive and restore the Reflect image to the SSD. All should work fine

You could then put the now spare hard drive in an external USB disk caddy.