Windows 10: How do I restore a computer image from a network drive to a new unallocated hard drive?

We are standardizing PC's at my work, the bulk of our fleet is Lenovo ThinkCentre M910s and Lenovo ThinkPad T470 both installed with Windows 10 Enterprise. For the next few batches of new PC's we're looking at exactly the same setup and so I am looking for an imaging process that will make setup faster. So far I've successfully created a default profile and saved an image to a network share on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard server on our domain. However, I have been unable to restore this image to a fresh PC with a blank hard drive.

I have our Windows 10 Enterprise installation media on a flash drive and can boot to that just fine on the new PC which is connected to our domain ethernet. From there I can navigate to Repair your computer>Troubleshoot>System Image Recovery. After a short scan I get the message that Windows cannot find a system image on this computer, which is fine, I don't have one on the computer. I click cancel and Select a system image is selected by default so I click Next. I click Advanced and click Search for a system image on the network and click Yes to the are you sure message. The search reveals nothing and asks me to specify the location of the image.


Now the network share the image was saved to is ServerName\System Image Backup but the image saved a folder called WindowsImageBackup and in that folder is a folder named DESKTOP-PP3DHV3 and in that folder are several more folders ranging from a folder called Backup with the date to Catalog, etc. When I've specified the location of the image through the System Image Recovery wizard I've tried '\\ServerName\System Image Backup', '\\ServerName\System Image Backup\WindowsImageBackup', '\\ServerName\System Image Backup\WindowsImageBackup\DESKTOP-PP3DHV3', and, '\\ServerName\System Image Backup\WindowsImageBackup\DESKTOP-PP3DHV3\Backup 2018-11-19 231636'. Each attempt results in the same error, "An internal error occurred. The following information may help you resolve the error. The supplied kernel information is invalid. (0x80070154).


I googled the error and found that System Image Recovery requires the image be saved to the root of the drive, particularly the WindowsImageBackup folder needs to be moved to the root of the drive. So I moved this folder to the root of my servers D: drive and shared the folder again. However, attempting then to specify the image location as \\ServerName\WindowsImageBackup results in the same error as before.


So I tried using Command Prompt commands from the installation media Repair your computer>Troubleshoot>Command Prompt. However when I run ipconfig /all the information is essentially blank with no Host Name and no Primary Dns Suffix. So my guess is that there is no networking which may be the result of my problem here, however I have no idea how to get the network to work in this state so that I can restore this image from my network location.


I am unsure what to do now. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but 3 days of research has resulted in nothing useful. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!

:)

 

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Thanks