Advanced system restore and restore file locations

I'm struggling to understand your underlying objective. System Restore aside as a means, what is it you wish to do?

And what is the relationship between your 'old' and 'new' drives?

For example, have you cloned your system drive to a new physical drive which you are now using in its place?
Are they the same Windows build?

I do hope you understand the very significant difference between disk imaging and system restore, and why you do need the former. They are useful in quite different circumstances and indeed system restore in particular may be simply unavailable.

Personally, I doubt anyone here will attempt to answer your question as posed, I'm afraid. Just my opinion...FWIW.

You cannot use the system restore points from one system on another. Even if they are nominally running the same build the two systems are significantly different. For a start, each user and system account is identified by a unique security identifier (SID). These are different for every install, even if the account names are the same. The SYSTEM account on the new install will be a different SID from the same account on the old install, so none of the permissions will work.

Anyway, you can't get to the restore points even if you wanted too. The are stored in the heavily protected, hidden and inaccessible System Volume Information folder.

jmcda said:

My old drive became corrupt...
My main goal is to rescue the data on it and restore the system as it once was.

@jmcda, what do you mean by the 'old drive became corrupt' ?

If you mean that the drive started to fail with read errors or bad blocks, then even data recovery may be difficult. If you just mean the installed windows was corrupt and stopped working properly, the the user files can be copied to the new system, but you will have to recreate the configuration to match the old system as best you can.

It may have been possible to repair the system on the old drive, but we'd need to know a lot more about how it 'became corrupt' before we could say if that was feasible.

Thanks for explaining where you've come from.

As it sounds as if you've taken no precautions against disk corruption or hardware failure such as backups or disk imaging (some of us constantly urge users to routinely use disk imaging) If your disk is indeed failing, your only possibility is to attempt data recovery from it.

When you can connect your old drive- best as a USB drive- then you can use programs like
Hard Disk Sentinel (trial)
(very quick clear GUI report)
HD Tune (Health and Error scan tabs)
Crystal Diskinfo

to give an idea of its status.

Use either of the first two to do a surface scan- this gives you a picture showing bad blocks in red, good green.

That way you know what you're dealing with.

If the disk is failing, you can try to see what data files you can recover just using file explorer.