Yeah, that’s why I’m confused! I made this backup on the same system literally week before it died, and since then, the only thing that’s changed is that I’ve got a fresh windows install on a fresh drive (which is identical to the previous drive I had - same company, same specs). Maybe I should try reformatting the new SSD and starting off by recovering the image rather than installing windows? I’m fairly sure I didn’t change any significant settings…
It’s worth a shot. Thanks. 
Wow. This is just weird. So I reset the disk, removed the partitions, reformatted everything, so now it’s back to how it was when I unpacked it. Then I try restoring a system image.
"Error restoring system image.
No disk found to restore the"
…And then it just stops. Like, it literally just stops mid-sentence. You can see a few pixels of the tops of a few letters of the next sentence… What even the… I don’t even… what the fuck?!
And now I’ve reinstalled windows and am getting the same error. Yay! :mad:
FUUUUUUUCK!
Well, now I’ve accidentally formatted my data drive. The data drive that had my backup. And all my games, movies, music, and assorted other things. And to top it all off, now it’s not letting me install windows on the new SSD. Because it only supports BIOS or some shit like that.
FUCK!
That is horrible. And yes, it’s easily done.
However, it is possible in some cases to undo this or at least recover data from a format.
Here’s a few links:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/276591-45-recover-formatted-drive-data
All is not lost.
Photorec is very good, although not user-friendly; kinda like a command line where you have to check every command.
I didn’t just accidentally reformat it; I deleted all of the partitions, then formatted it. I think I might have done that twice. But I’ll give that tool a try once my fresh windows install works. Finally got the damn thing to recognize that my SSD exists. 
And I found out why the restore wasn’t working… This drive is smaller (by less than a gigabyte) than the old drive. At least I know why that didn’t work. It’s been one hell of a morning.
Just to give this a little update: I finally found the right driver for my wifi card (fun fact: finding drivers for a wifi card with no internet access and no idea what the card is or how to check is a pain in the ass - it was more or less a fluke that I figured out how to learn what the card is), installed it, and now, on a fresh windows install, I am running Recuva deep scan on my HDD which got nuked. So far, 3%, 6 hours left, over 100,000 files found.
The thing is, formating and deleting partitions still usually do not delete the actual data. That said, the data you get back may be just the files, without any real structure. It’s more like sifting through a garbage can to find what you need.
The stuff you probably want are your documents and save files for your games. You might also be able to get your downloaded installers. The rest may be useless.
BTW, my guess is that your system was originally installed using BIOS emulation, but, when you reinstalled Windows, you used UEFI instead. This can be better, as UEFI has a lot more features, but BIOS and UEFI have two different types of partitions that are incompatible with one another.
I waited all night and not a single recovered file actually worked. The videos were all corrupted, the save files were corrupted, the music was corrupted… I’m not sure what “excellent” is supposed to mean, but oh well. So that was a total loss. But at least my computer is back up and running.