Windows 10: System Image Restore Fail

Hi All,
I had to wind my OS back to windows 7 using recovery media because a system image I created with the backup and restore tool in windows 10 failed to restore.
The system image was on an external hdd but it could not be found when plugged into a USB port.
I'll probably stay with windows 7 and would appreciate recommendations for RELIABLE free or paid software to create a system image.

:)

 

Windows 10 destroyed my laptop

When I installed Windows 10 for the first time it was working fine for at least 3 days. Then that's when everything went wrong. My Start menu wouldn't open and my speakers kept making static sounds. So I went on Microsoft forums for a solution to get back
my start menu. What they told me was to use powershell and type this command

When I typed in the command I saw yellow letters and red letters. When it was done I couldn't open my App store. That's when I decided I was going to roll back to Windows 8.1.

When I was back in Windows 8.1 I had a lot of problems. Media player wasn't working and the apps that I downloaded from the app store would close after I opened them. I could only open the app store, but I couldn't play any games from the app store. I did
SFC/ scannow and it found some corrupted files. So then I typed another command in CMD

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

After that I ran SFC /scannow again and it said it didn't find any corrupted files. I restarted my computer and then tried opening Media player and app store games, but they wouldn't open.

What should I do? Is my laptop stuck like this forever?

 

System Image Restore Failed

Hi Danny,

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

link.

Let us know how it goes.

 

Backup & Restore's 'system image' can be temperamental (I know, I use it). It's critical to use the same recovery environment as the version of Windows that made the image. That would be the rescue CD that it offers to make at the end of making the image, or (for W10) a recovery drive USB made on the same system that made the image. A 32-bit environment can't restore a 64-bit image, nor can 7 restore 10 (and vice versa). Even with the right environment, it can fail to find the image if you have moved or renamed it.

Many here recommend Macrium Reflect (free).

TenForums tutorial - Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

SevenForums tutorial - Windows 7: Imaging with free Macrium

 

I would throw AOMEI into the ring as an alternative to Macrium. It has a very easy interface, is quick, is very lightweight in size, and also offers incremental backups.

Fwiw, I used Windows own disk imaging before recently clean installing the latest W10 version and always found it reliable. With talk of W10 dropping this feature at some point I looked for alternatives and really liked AOMEI over everything else I tried.

 

Macrium Reflect is for me, it has got me out of many a pickle since I began using it, the delta restore is a very quick way of returning a troublesome PC to a working one.

 

For those wanting other possibilities: Image for Windows, Acronis True Image -- just to name two more of the many.