I have had NO luck creating an image on several win 8 computers using the Win 7 Backup. Used both external and intenal backup drives. I gave up and switched to the free Paragon Backup. Had no problems with it. Make sure you create and test a recovery disk within Paragon. Paragon also allows differential backups on a schedule.

Kirk,

Did you try to use  the Paragon image(s) to restore the computer(s) onto new OS hard-drive(s)?  Assuming that it was a "factory" Windows 8 (pro?)  installation rather than an "upgrade", did it preserve the Windows 8 recovery options?  See my latest posts (yesterday and today) at the following link for my experiences with this issue:

answers.microsoft.com/.../865fbd74-06bc-4cc3-b054-d3d56b60eeff

Jerry

No, I haven't tried to restore, but the restore disk does see the backup. Paragon allows you to include all the partitions in the backup.

Hi Kirk    

         Thanks for the quick reply !!  Do you know how I could get rid of the 500MB unallocated space on my 2TB EXteral drive? It is acutually on the left of my main parition when I view it in the disk management  and I heard it had to be on the right of if if I was to use Windows to extend the main patition over that space   Thanks

I'm not Kirk, but I've found www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html very useful for viewing and modifying partitions as well as checking disks.  I wouldn't mess with partitions on any drives that aren't backed up though - especially Windows8 OS disks - see me other post links above.

If I was you I'd give it a try on another hard drive before counting on it!

If your error shows #80780119, Dell Win8 includes a 500 Mb has a hidden recovery partition labeled WINRETOOLS that, on my machine, has 227Mb that must be backed up. Windows requires more free space than that on a 500Mb or larger disk. My solution was use the free download bootable disk version of "Partition Wizard" ( www.partitionwizard.com/download.html ) or similar program to reduce the size of the 500Mb partition to 490Mb. Going under the 500Mb limit sharply reduces the free space required from 320Mb to 50Mb and all is good to go. The Windows partition program won't touch it because Dell created it.

Just don't count on the Windows recovery tools to work after that!

See my "Jerry XPS8500" March 29, 2013 entry at:

answers.microsoft.com/.../865fbd74-06bc-4cc3-b054-d3d56b60eeff.

Those Windows recovery tools don't really serve my needs anyway (can't recover most of my programs/apps and updates), so I'll stick with the "Windows7" system imaging tool until Microsoft breaks it.  Hopefully by then there will be third party software that works reliably!

Good luck!

Folks who are following this thread may be interested in an issue in Windows 8.1 beta. The UI for image backup was removed and you have to issue a command at a command prompt to create the backup. See answers.microsoft.com/.../b05eb93d-2c4f-42cc-b392-bc261cc07b44 .

I too had this issue and was able to solve it by creating the following key with REGEDIT.  

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\volsnap

   MinDiffAreaFileSize   REG_DWORD 32

No third party tools were needed, nor did I need to adjust my partitions in any way.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb891959(v=vs.85).aspx#mindiffareafilesize

Can you elaborate on what exactly this regedit does?

Looks like you are telling the shadow copy that it only needs 32MB instead of the original 320MB...

Did you test this method,  by (1) Creating an image & then (2) Successfully restoring from that image?

Thank you