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Does this mean you could have renamed all but the R940 folder with, say, a leading ‘z’? (just in case I run into the same problem!)

Nope; what it means is that if you put a folder in the WindowsImageBackup folder that doesn’t contain a W7 system image – or even an emtpy folder – and name it, say, AAAA, the restoration utility on the recovery boot disk won’t be able to see anything else in the WindowsImageBackup folder. In other words, if I had changed the name of that “B300-XP” folder to, say, “zB300-XP,” I wouldn’t have run into this problem because, all other folders now being alphabetically ahead of it, they will all appear on the list, i.e. even if I had renamed that R940 folder to “zR940” like you said, it still wouldn’t appear on the list because of that B300-XP folder (which doesn’t contain a W7 image) is still alphabetically ahead of it 🙂

Mr. Spector’s article offers great advice. But if I were to change out the HDD on my laptop (a Dell Latitude E6420, which is my only PC,) I’d go about it differently. Here’s why:

1. I do full system image backups regularly – as in, every couple of weeks or so – on multiple external drives. I have duplicate copies of 32- and 64-bit system images, as well as 32-bit/64-bit dual-boot images, so I can reinstall any of them at any time.

2. With this whole Cryptolocker thing going on, I never keep anything saved on my laptop – nothing! Pictures, movies, music, work documents… everything goes on at least one external drive. You just can’t be too careful. So, running a complete Disk Cleanup right before every system image I create, I get system images no larger than 38-43 gigabutes or so.

3. If I recall correctly (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Windows won’t let you restore a system image onto a smaller drive, even if the system image is far smaller than the size of the new disk.

So, for me at least, the simplest way to migrate is to just swap out the old HHD for the new SSD and just reinstall Windows on that.

I should add that, in light of #2 above, I probably won’t need an SSD larger than 64Gb, so I could get one and install Windows on it, and wait for the prices of larger SSDs to come down before I swap it out again. That said, if I keep doing what I’m doing, I probably won’t see a need to upgrade again in a while; and it’s doubtful if I even would be using the same laptop for that long anyway.