Windows 10: Restored image will not boot

Having a really weird and annoying problem. I'm running Windows 10 Pro and my boot device is a Samsung Pro 950 512GB M.2 NVME SSD. It's been running great through many Windows 10 upgrades. I'm currently running the latest 1903 version. I'm starting to run out of room on the C drive so I purchased a new Samsung Pro 970 1TB M.2 NVME SSD. No matter what I try I cannot seem to get a clone or restored image of my boot drive to work. Every time it boots it gets the spinning circles for about a minute and then the circles freeze and nothing happens or sometimes it reboots and does same thing. Sometimes it's the windows logo above the spinning circles and sometimes it's still the ASUS logo. Disabling fast boot was able to see the message, "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed".




Here's what I've tried so far.

1) Used Easeus Todo Backup to clone my disk 0 to the new drive via USB 3.1 NVME enclousre while booted up. Then swapped out the drives.

2) Used Easeus Todo Backup to first image the disk 0 drive to an image file, then swapped out the drives and used the easeus recovery disk to boot and restore the image to the new drive.

3) Used Windows Backup and Restore to create an image then after swapping drives used the Windows recovery CD to boot and then restore to the new drive.

4) Tried swapping drives and installing Windows 10 to the new drive and after installing Windows 10 on the new drive, booting from windows rescue CD and restoring the windows image file.

All of these resuled in the same issue.

I also verified that the partition structure is the same on original and restored drives. The restored drive of course has extra unallocated space.

Running the windows troubleshooting console I tried using the bootrec commands.

bootrec /fixboot would give "access denied" even though I was in administrator console.

bootrec /scanos would show it only recognized \windows.old as an installation. I could see all the files on the drive and the normal \windows folder was there.

I would really like to avoid re-installing Windows as I have so many applications and configuration setups.

My goal is to be able to restore to the larger drive and then expand the C partition to use the larger drive once it boots. And also to have peace of mind that taking the time to image my C drive is worth it in that I can actually restore it if anything ever went wrong in the future.

:)

 

Restoring Windows 10 Image using Macrium Reflect


In addition to the above. Here's my suggestion in step by step.
I assume you have Macrium Installed in your current HD and already made a backup copy.

1. Connect your new HD via USB port and boot up.
2. Run Macrium, click on Restore tab then select the Backup Image that you made to restore
3. click on "select a different target disk" then select your new HD as destination
   
   
   
4. Proceed to restore then Shutdown and disconnect the old HD and replace with the new HD
5. Boot up with your new HD.

 

System Image Problem


Hi Nick,

No need to stress.
Since the dl of the windows install media failed twice in a row already we are going to do as Bill suggests.
No use wasting another day on it at this point.

Here is a description of the steps to follow:

- Connect the external drive that contains the Macrium images we made.

-Boot off of the Macrium rescue CD. Make the necessary changes in bios so booting from CD is the highest on the boot order priority list or use the machine's bootmenu (Fn key ? ) to select to boot off of CD.

- From within Macrium select restore. Browse for image 0_SysRes etc. and load it in Macrium.

- Select the drive to restore to: your c: drive. Make sure it is the correct drive. Only one internal drive should be connected at this point.

-Drag and drop the loaded backup image to the beginning of the C:\ partition. It must be fully at the left of the partition.

- Click restore and confirm.

- Once it has finished close Macrium. It will automatically reboot.

-Boot again off of the CD.

-Macrium loads and select restore again.

-Browse for and select 1_Windows from the backup drive. Select the same destination drive and drag and drop it right next to the small partition we just restored. Click restore, confirm the overwrite and let it finish.

-Again close Macrium and reboot once more off of the cd.

-In Macrium on the top left hand side there a menu option that reads something along these lines (I'll load it in a few minutes to verify and correct if necessary) : "Fix Windows boot problems".
Click it.

-Let it finish and reboot off the main hard drive this time.

- Cross your fingers and hopefully Windows will start up.


I suggest not doing this immediately. I hope Bill will have a look at the suggested steps and correct any if need be.

Best, *Wink

 

Windows 10 1709 System Restore problems...


That seems to be an attempt at Option 2 in the tutorial, which requires you to
a. Boot to a command prompt (Did you?)
b. You then seem to be mixing steps 3,4 and 5, thus your command is incorrect.

I suggest Option 1 is easier.

If you still have problems, please repost listing each specific step and saying which option from the tutorial you are using. Thanks.