Windows 10: Win 10 System Image Backups Will Have Partial Contents Span Over to Other Partitions in a...

Win 10 "Create System Image" from "Backup and Restore Windows 7" had been very reliable and had been successfully restored many times for my different PCs. In the past I used one drive for one system image. However, I have several PCs and different OS 32-bit and 64-bit versions. There are just so many drives to handle. Recently, I bought a 5TB external HDD and made ten partitions mostly NTFS partitions, one exFAT and one FAT32 partition out of it, with the hope that this 5TB drive could be a centralized location for all my system images from all PCs.After a few system image backups I fo

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Win 10 repair disk unable to find Win 10 system image backup

As a workaround to this issue, I have verified that by doing a system image backup from Win 7 and adding the Win 10 partition to the list of partitions (the Win 10 partition appears to be a "data" partition from Win 7 perspective) to be backed up by the
Win 7 system image backup, I can then restore both Win 7 and Win 10 partitions. The main drawback is I have to restore the Win 7 partition in order to restore the Win 10 partition. I can choose to only restore the Win 7 partition, but not to only restore the
Win 10 partition.

As a side note, if I restore a Win 7 image backup made before I installed Win 10, then there's no option to restore "Windows 10" from either Win 10 or Win 7 repair. I'm wondering if or how a Win 10 repair would function if restoring to a replaced hard drive.
If all of the partitions on a hard drive are included during a system image backup, then system image restore is supposed to be able to partition and format a hard drive as part of the repair restore. I have the impression that Win 7 repair restore can do
this, but I'm not sure if Win 10 repair restore can do this.

 

Win 10 repair disk unable to find Win 10 system image backup

Although I thought that the Win 7 repair / restore was the issue, at another forum it was mentioned that doing a Win 7 backup to the same drive / partition as a prior Win 10 backup would cause the Win 10 images to no longer be visible to the Win 7 or Win
10 repair systems. This seems to be the actual cause of the problem.

My system has 4 hard drives, 5 partitions each. Windows 7 is installed on the 3rd drive, 2nd partition. Window 10 is installed on the 4th drive, 2nd partition. The Win 7 and Win 10 backups were made to the 2nd drive, 5th partition, and also to a "spare"
partition: 1st drive, 3rd partition (the 1st drive is the same drive as the boot partition, so the 2nd drive is the main backup). So I have two sets of Win 7 and Win 10 backups. I use different computer names for Win 7 and Win 10, such as NAME-7 and NAME-10
to avoid confusion with the image backups.

The suggested workaround from the other forum is to have two instances of WindowsImageBackup, one named WindowsImageBackup.W7 the other named WindowsImageBackup.W10, and then renaming one of them to WindowsImageBackup before doing a backup or restore. Using
the two separate instances of WindowsImageBackup appears to be working. This would seem to imply that somehow information is being stored in the WindowsImageBackup folder itself, but I don't know how. I do not see any files in the WindowsImageBackup, only
directories with the computer names.

 

Win 7 image restore breaks ability to see Win 10 image backups

I have a multi-boot system, XP Pro (32 bit), XP Pro X64 (64 bit), Win 7 Pro (64 bit), Win 10 Pro (64 bit). Each OS is on a separate hard drive and partition. The C: partition is boot only (no operating system on it).

I did a system image backup from Win 10 and also from Win 7. Once I do a Win 7 image restore using Win 7 repair (dvd), the Win 10 images backups no longer appear in the list of backups if I later run Win 10 repair or Win 7 repair.

The workaround for this bug is to do a system image backup from Win 7 and include the Win 10 partition in the Win 7 image backup (to Win 7, the Win 10 partition is a "data" partition). The the Win 7 repair will restore the Win 10 partition unless restore to "non-system" partitions is turned off. I confirmed this works by formatting both the Win 7 and Win 10 partitions before doing a repair / restore test.

What I don't understand is what the Win 7 restore changes to my system that prevents the Win 10 backup system images from appearing in the list of image backups. The Win 10 image folders are still present on my hard drive(s).