Restoring a Dell factory image file (.wim) to a new hard disk

A bit of googling I found this excellent article on tjb-ts.blogspot which gave me the quick indication that this COULD be done and how to do it.

Basically, I extracted the factory.wim file from the recovery partition of a failing hard drive, and also got the imagex.exe and it's config files from the tools folder in the recovery partition and stuck them all on my external usb.

Then, using a vista disk, I booted into the recovery options after installing a new hard drive.

Going into command line, I issue the following commands to get the new hard disk ready, active and formatted:

diskpart
select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
assign letter=c:
active
exit
format c: /q /y

once this was complete, I navigated to my USB drive (handy that vista boot disk repair has usb support - as does windows 7) and ran the imagex command to restore the factory.wim file:

Imagex /apply factory.wim 1 c:\

Once this was complete, and again, thanks to the tjb-ts blog, I needed to run the vista startup repair option, which sorted out the booting issue. If I didn't run this option, then vista wouldn't load.

All in all, a successful operation!