For safety reasons I regularly create a “System Image Recovery” in Windows 7. Then, last week, my SSD crashed (luckily two days after I took a new backup). I plugged in a new hard-drive (a bigger one) and wanted to restore the image.

I was able to boot from my USB key. Windows detected the new hard-drive and could load the system image. However, Windows 7 refused to restore the image:

The system image restore failed. Error: Error details: The parameter is incorrect.(0x80070057)

(on German Windows: “Interner Fehler: Falscher Parameter. (0x80070057)”).

Google showed me that a lot of other people seem to have the same problem – without providing me any solution. It took me round about 2 hours to find a solution: The only way to circumvent this error seems to load the image from network and disconnect *ALL* hard-drives (despite the one you want to restore the image onto) and USB keys (even the USB key from which was booted) just before clicking on “Restore”.