Fixing Windows 7 After Reinstalling via Repair Disk and Backup Image

It’s kinda funny that I have only been updating lately when something goes wrong with my computer. Oh well, until I have more time, that’s how it will be.

Lately, my hard drive has been having major startup problems. It would whir and clackle when trying to start after a night or a few hours off and would usually not get detected by my laptop until after ten or fifteen tries to start. So today, I went over to a good friend’s house and swapped my failing hard drive with an old hard drive that he was no longer using. It ran fine in my computer and mine wouldn’t run in his computer so it was the hard drive that had problems and not my good old laptop.

After returning home, I put in the windows 7 repair disk I made yesterday to reinstall Windows. The first few tries didn’t work apparently because my external hard drive was attached. After it loaded, I plugged in my external, loaded the system image that I made yesterday, and replaced the contents of my friend’s hard drive with the image.

Once that finished (and a couple restarts), I used the Win7 backup tool to get all of the files and directories in my data partition back. That didn’t seem to restore everything (visibly, the positions of my desktop icons weren’t restored, but there were other problems) so I sent my system back to the restore point made during the system image/backup yesterday. That fixed the desktop icon positions, but:
1) my Windows Explorer “Favorites” in the sidebar was empty and I could not modify it or restore its contents to the default,
2) (minor) the folder icons for special folder such as “My Music” and “My Documents” didn’t appear, and
3) (minor) in the control panel, all of the user images except for the guest one were blank – changing the picture did change the picture elsewhere on my system, but for some reason the frame showing the current picture in the “control panel” > “add or remove user accounts” was white, even after creating a new user and selecting a picture.

I dug for solutions on the interwebs and remembered that Favorites actually maps to Links in my Users/ directory (not intuitive at all). Once I made that folder, right clicked “Favorites” in the sidebar, and selected “Restore favorite links,” the folder populated with the three default links and I could modify its contents! I was ecstatic since I use the shortcuts that I place there frequently. Also, moving “My Documents” and “My Music” around and back to my E:\ brought back the appropriate icons. I have yet to find a fix for the user image problem, but that doesn’t really affect anything.

Edit: Also had to make all of my data in E:\ not read-only in order to do certain things. Not sure why it was read-only before.

So in case I ever do this again (likely) or any of you do, I hope this helps. =)