Can you install windows from a back up file on external hard drive?

Question

I originally received Windows 7 Professional from a friend who was in computer sciences at the local university and received free software as a perk. It was downloaded and burned onto a disc, which she loaned to me so I could use it with Bootcamp. There were some issues with the registration, but after some time with Windows tech support everything was set up and working well, fully legal. I am no longer in contact with the friend, and I returned the boot disk to her, hence my current problem.
Today I decided to expand my bootcamp partition by using winclone to create an image, then merging the partitions and repartitioning with boot camp assistant. Unfortunately winclone didn't work for some reason. When creating the image I got an error message telling me to check the logs, which I unfortunately ignored since it appeared to have worked anyways. Now when I try to restore the image to the botcamp partition I get the error "Image file not found."
I did a back up of my windows partition before I started everything, so I still have my data. The problem is getting it back into the partition... I have a blank partition sitting there with no operating system. Is there some way to completely reinstall windows onto a blank partition using only the back up files?
As far as I know none of my friends have a start-up disk that I could borrow, and being a poor student I don't have the $300 to buy another copy of the operating system.

Answer 1

Martin_Had a écrit:
Thank you Andaleeb. I appear to have an old backup of a year ago, and a more recent full back up plus an incremental backup.
Regrettably I don't really understand what is going on because firstly the restore does not complete its cycle so I cannot see what that backup file contains and secondly all I have read would suggest that the .tly file is the full backup and the catalog.buc file is the incremental backup. For the present, the catalog shows the photos for 2014 which makes me think I might have backed from the old back up file.
I am minded to create another catalog and try again.
Any views on what I can do?
A backup (full or incremental) is a folder, not a file. It contains renamed pictures file copies as well a copies of the files and subfolders of the original catalog. The catalog.buc is a renamed copy of the database of your original catalog while the backup.tly. That backup.tly file contains the information to restore the renamed pictures where you decide, the original location or a new custom one. You can't do anything with the backup yourself, only the restore process can do the job if it finds the backup.tly file. In the case of an incremental backup, you have to tell the restore process where to find the incremental backup folder; it finds the backup.tly file in that folder and finds what is to restore there; then it asks you for the previous backup folder (in your case the full backup); you then browse to that full backup folder so that the restore process can find find the backup.tly there; the restore then deals with the rest of the files to restore.