How to restore files without OS and drivers?

[jvjakesta]

So I was trying to move my hard drive onto my new motherboard, but in the process I was forced to wipe my hard drive and reinstall windows. Now, I've updated all my new drivers and have practically made my computer fully functional, except my imaged external drive has all my files. How do I restore all my files, documents, and programs that I need from it? The only problem with all this is my old operating system and drivers are still on the imaged drive. I don't need those anymore. I just want my files back that I backed up to it.

 

[MarkW]

You cannot pick and choose from an image.

Either you restore the image to a hard drive, or you reinstall all of the software from scratch.

You might be able to partition your hard drive, and restore the image to that partition. That might let you recover some data files, but you would still need to reinstall the software so that the entries that are needed in the registry are put into the newly created registry.

 

[jvjakesta]

even pictures and music?

 

[MarkW]

A disk image is a single file containing the contents of a previous disk partition. The only way to recover anything from an image is to "install" the image to a disk partition. Then they will become individual files again.