To make a long story short, I buggered up the Windows 10 installation on my wife's PC while trying to address a GPU issue. Fortunately, I had been saving regular system images to a spare HD on her machine using the Windows System Image utility--including one from earlier that day. Unfortunately, I'm running into no end of trouble trying to restore from those images.
The drives in question:
Disk 0 = 1TB backup SATA drive containing images (MBR)
Disk 1 = 1TB NVME drive originally with windows installation (MBR)
Disk 2 = 32GB USB recovery drive
What I've done so far:
-Use the Windows Recovery Media utility on my Windows 11 machine to create a USB recovery drive
-Verify that I'm booting in legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI
-Boot into recovery mode from the recovery drive
-Open command prompt, use diskpart to clear Disk 1, create a new MBR volume (same as the install used to create the images), and format that volume as NTFS
-Use "System Image Recovery" option, select image from the backup drive
-Ensure Disk 1 is unchecked in the "exclude disks" menu of the Image Recovery tool
-Get "The system image recovery failed" with error code 0x80042412 in the details dialog
-Run chkdsk on Disk 0 and 1 (no errors)
-Run through about every possible iteration and permutation of the above steps, while referencing how-tos on the topic
From the few forum posts I can find on the topic, one of the big problems is people trying to restore an image to a volume that's smaller than the volume that was imaged. But this is the exact same drive the image was created from.
The only thing I haven't chased down fully is using the "Install Drivers" option in the recovery tool--mainly because I can't figure out what drivers I might need. And I figured since diskpart has no problem reading and modifying the drive, it's probably not a storage device driver issue.
In hindsight, I should have just cloned the drive instead of messing with images, but here I am... Any tips or suggestions are appreciated!
(The ironic thing is I was getting ready to help her pick out a Linux distro to migrate to. That's still the plan, but I'd like to get her back to a stable Windows install on the side to ease the transition)
Thanks, would that driver come from the mobo manufacturer or the drive manufacturer?
I read some references to people using an Intel storage driver, but this is an AMD system if that makes a difference.
Mobo, storage controller driver. Maybe others.
The is used to boot needs appropriate drivers. It’s why most backup software suggests making a boot usb before you need it.
I was able to track down what I believe are the correct storage controller drivers from the mobo manufacturer and install those during the recovery process, but no change.
The only other thing I can think of is to dig out an old >1Tb sata drive and try recovering to that.
And yes, lesson learned for next time about making and testing the recovery drive ahead of time. I mistakenly put my trust in MS that recovering from a full system image using their own utility would be a dead simple process...
You might need other drivers in the boot image, like chipset or controller.