Windows 10: All fixed now but I had big problems reverting from W10

This is just for information really... I don't know why or what the reasons for this happening were but all is well now.

For some unknown reason I was unable to restore a working Acronis image (of Vista) back onto the C partition used by W10.

(I'll no doubt be back to W10 shortly, just needed some things on the old installation)


For anyone interested here are the gory details,


1/ Pre W10 I made a final Acronis Vista image of the C partition.

2/ W10 installed onto unallocated HDD after first deleting all the partitions.

3/ Decide to pop the Vista image back for a while. To do this I had to use the bootable Acronis disc... something I've done a few times in the past. This restore would only overwrite the W10 C drive and leave the small 350mb system partition that W10 created. Is that a problem ?

4/ The restart to Vista brings up the W10 logo and a "repairing your PC" message. Hmmm. So that must be from the small system partition I assume. It asks for a restart and then boots into the familiar Vista welcome screen but instead of going to the desktop it goes to the Vista "preparing your desktop" screen. Something you only see on initial install. And its stuck... non responsive. Fortunately the power button works as normal (in fact task manager could be opened and shows Vista as running)

5/ I reboot and its the same, stuck on preparing desktop.

6/ I popped a Vista disk in and did a "repair your PC" in the hope that something would be fixed. It said the PC was unable to start (but it could) and that repairs were not possible. I also then had a blue screen with an error box about a rundll32 error. Power down. Next *Smile

7/ I quickly reinstall Vista from scratch just to get a copy on the PC. No problems there. Install Acronis and running Acronis from within Vista (which is how I normally do things) I restore the same image again.

8/ This time its perfect... and what a treat on the eyes.

As I say, I'll be back shortly no doubt (I imaged W10 just before I left it... that's going to be fun... nah... I made a full disk image of that, all partitions and sector by sector so it should be a breeze)

:)

 

Windows 10 cannot connect to update

I upgraded to W10 from W7 Home Premium. I figured if someone knew how to fix the registry it would be that simple. I did not want to do a recovery because I have to reinstall everything. Well, I ended up doing a recovery and it fixed the problem. Now I
am reinstalling my programs. W10 saved all my documents in the documents folder. When you update to W10 and then have to do a recovery, you can not revert to W7 after the recovery. But, everything is working now. I have upgraded 8 laptops/desktops from 7,
8, 8.1, with no problem.

 

windows 10 still trying to install blocks updates

I have reverted back to w8.1 from 10 to run software.

W10 is trying to install and to block it I have had to stop all updates

How can I delete W10 to allow all other updates to install?

 

Hi

I have been using EaseUS to make backups of my Windows 10 install, and I have reset it 3 times since the original install.

No problems that way, I haven't tried to revert from Windows 10 because I'm dual booting it and still have my Windows install intact.

Mike

 

I think that is what caused your problems.
The 350mb system partition was probably the System Reserved partition and the System, Active partition containing the boot files...
When you restored the image you may have had 2 active partitions with boot files...
I'm not sure what you have now after the steps you've done.
You should post a maximized Disk Management screen print of your current setup.
You may need to do some cleanup work to prevent future issues, or you may have already cleaned partitions and settings with the reinstall so everything is ok...

 

Hi

You should think about dual booting instead of replacing your old Windows installation.
It was easy to do and you will still have access to everything.

What I've seen with EaseUS is that in automatically sees the backup drive it was created in and gives that as the option to create a system restore.

I was surprised that it not only recognized what I wanted to backup, but that when I went to restore it knew which drive I wanted to restore, even though the boot disk was made previously in Windows 8.

I expected it to ask which backup I wanted to use.

I restored Windows 10 again to day (3rd time) to my last backup to clear out a bad install that I messed up.

Just a few clicks and 15 minutes and it was all up and running again.

I'm going to create a new backup every couple of days while I'm doing the testing.

It makes it very easy to get rid of problems that I've caused myself messing around.

Mike

 

Thanks Mike. Dual booting is something I might investigate actually. Why not *Smile

With W10 I started out using its own imaging utility but found it has a serious bug in that it doesn't restore the installed updates history list (a problem some other backup software has too). So I used Acronis running from the bootable disc which of course makes perfect copies. I wouldn't be without backups, indispensable.


David... I'm pretty sure that the Vista install is now Vista with a Vista system reserved partition followed by the main C partition (I did it all as a clean install on unallocated space). The restored Acronis image is of the C partition only and not the system reserved but it all booted straight off after the final restore of running Acronis from within Vista. I'll check later... on W8.1 on main PC at the moment.

I agree that it must have been that W10 reserved partition that caused the problem. The other partition had been replaced with Vista and yet the W10 logo and repair screen appeared. Its the only place it could have come from. Never had anything like that happen before.

 

I'm wrong, no reserved partition following clean reinstall and then recovery from Acronis.

 

Set up dual boot this morning *Smile I have a couple of questions though which I will post separately.