Windows 10: Restoring System Image When System Image Restore Fails?

Hi guys,

Bear with me on this little odyssey. It's a bit of a ramble, and more just me moaning than asking an actual question, but if anyone can help me figure out where I was going wrong I can sleep a bit easier.

I was working on a project to deploy a custom Windows image and, after virtual testing, needed an actual real life laptop to test it on. So I picked up my work test laptop, made a system image and got to work. My testing all went okay, but in the process the hard drive was wiped and reformatted several times (all quick formats, no secure full passes or anything).

When all my testing was done, I went to restore my the backup system image to the laptop, via my USB Windows 10 Installer, and got the error "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found". Great.

So I got to researching and tried everything I could find on the forums

• Don't plug in the external HDD until in the System Image Restore wizard, so it doesn't wrongly identify it as the main disk
• In DiskPart "Clean" the disk
• Follow the installation wizard and allow it to create the system, msr, recovery and primary partitions
• Follow the installation wizard and allow it to fully install a clean Windows
• Manually create the standard Windows partitions
• Create just one big NTFS partition
• Convert the disk to gpt
• Convert the disk to mbr
• Change the boot order so the HDD is first
• Mount the VHD, load in the SOFTWARE hive and find the build number of the Windows Image, make sure the installation media I'm using to restore with is of the same Windows version (It was the Nov 19 version btw)

None of that worked... I have assumed that for some reason the log file (that I couldn't seem to find) had determined the disk as bigger than it actually is and now won't restore to a "smaller" disk, even though it is the same hard drive. So I tried to manually restore the files to the hard drive and make it bootable. I mounted the VHD (on another computer) and used robocopy to copy out the whole contents of the partition to a folder on the external HDD. I got stuck in some never ending loops for a while because robocopy kept expanding the junction folders, until I figured out how to exclude them (/xj).

I formatted the hard drive as gpt with: a 100MB EFI Partition, formatted FAT32; a 16MB MSR partition; a 2GB recovery partition (so I could eventually enable BitLocker); and formatted the rest of the disk as a basic NTFS partition. I then robocopied the Windows files over to the hard drive, and tried to create the boot files with "bcdboot T:\Windows /l en-gb /s S: /f ALL" and got the error "Failure when attempting to copy the boot files". I was stuck here for hours, nothing I could find for that would work, none of the bootrec commands, nothing. Eventually I remembered the System Image had also backed up the system partition, so I managed to mount the VHD for that, and copy the files over. I then used bcdedit to fix the broken device values and... it still wouldn't boot.

But at least now I was getting a vague BSoD. The error code didn't help me, it basically just said it can't boot with no reasoning. But I figured the system partition must be right now, there's just something wrong with the Windows partition. I ran a chkdsk which came back fine. I tried to run sfc /scannow to the target Windows but just kept getting the error "Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service". So then I tried to use "DISM /Image:C:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:\sources\install.wim" but kept getting the error "87 cleanup-image is unknown".

I figured that the DISM in the installer mustn't be able to be used that way, so extracted the Winre.wim from the installer and created a recovery partition on the hard drive, used reagentc to connect it to the Windows installation. I was able to boot to that no problem when Windows wouldn't boot, affirming that the system partition was working okay. I tried running sfc and dism from there with the same errors, and I couldn't think of any way to proceed.

I've now given up. I've spent far too long trying to restore a backup of a test OS, I needed to move on. I've installed a fresh copy of Windows and deleted the backup to stop me from trying again. My problem is, if this happens to a client I need to know how to fix it. If they have licensed software for example and need to restore the OS and not just individual files.

My working theory at the moment for my manual process is that System Image Backup excludes system files to reduce the size of the backup, which is why I couldn't restore by just copying over the files. I figured DISM /cleanup-image would have actually fixed this if I could have gotten it to run from the installer or recovery. Maybe if I'd removed the hard drive form the laptop, plugged it in to my PC and ran DISM and SFC from there it would have worked?

Has anyone had a similar situation and been able to actually get it to boot? Are there any glaring errors that anyone can see? Does anyone know why SFC and DISM wouldn't work from the recovery partition or the install disk? Are my theories about Windows getting the disk size wrong in the first place and not backing up system files in a system image valid? Maybe it was all because I excluded those junction folders instead of copying them as junctions (I didn't realise that was an option until much later)?

submitted by /u/Chakiki
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:)

 

System image restore fails

I'm replacing the hard drive on my laptop since my original is full.

1. Using Windows' Backup and Restore, I created a system image.

2. Since I do not have a DVD drive, I created a Windows 10 install media (here) directly to a USB.

3. I boot up using the USB and attempt to restore the image.

I receive the following error -

Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using BIOS and this computer is using EFI.

It's the same machine. I tried the same steps listed in this Microsoft Community question

here. Didn't work.

1. I went into the BIOS and disabled Legacy Support so it would boot up in UEFI.

2. And vice versa, re-enabled it.

3. Tried it with Secure Boot disabled as well.

I'm not understanding why this is happening as everything has been done on the same laptop.

Any ideas before I have to go out and purchase third party imaging/restore software?

Thanks.

 

the system image restore failed

i am trying to migrate from one computer to another with 100% settings, applications and datas. after i created full system image on one computer (windows 7 pro) and try to restore that to another computer (windows 7 pro, also tried windows 10 pro) it gave
me this message,

the system iamge restore failed. windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firemware. the system image was created on a computer using bios and this ocmputer is using efi.

what can i do to restore that image? beside windows tool, any other recommendation to fully migrate to another computer?

 

System Image Restore Failed

Hi Danny,

For possible troubleshooting steps, please check GuyOsherov's post through this

link.

Let us know how it goes.