HELP! System Restore Failed - But the VHD Remains!

[dugn]

I need to know if a VHD created on (and of) Windows 7 (Ultimate) x64 can be used as the primary boot partition since restore of this VHD isn’t working through Win7 System Restore.

Details
I created daily Windows 7 System Images of my system – a C (boot) and D (data storage) drive. One half of my 2x SSD RAID 0 C: drive suffered a hardware failure. When attempting a System Restore from the latest Windows 7 Image to the replacement C drive, I couldn’t get the System Restore image to show as a selectable image to restore (the image index was blank). I had the right drivers loaded and used a recently created x64 System Restore CD, but still no images appeared in the list to choose from.

I have the entire WindowsImageBackup directory and everything underneath it (including the critical 32GB of data in a C: VHD) safely preserved. But just can’t get it to be available in System Restore dialogs to prefer the critical restore.

Options I see are either to somehow replace a Win7 boot partition with the functional C: VHD image (I can already attach it in Disk Mgr on another Win7 machine to view and preserve the content – but it’s the time and effort of the configuration I want to get back) or somehow fixing System Restore to see my C: image and restore it correctly.

I haven’t lost any data – just the hours of Win7 C: drive configuration that are resident on the VHD I can’t seem to restore from.

Ideas, suggestions?