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)
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.