Windows 10 Restoring an system copy

bochane

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Oct 18, 2012
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That is a good exercise, isn't it?

I made a system copy on an external USB disk, then a repair disk on CD. Because there are more system copies on that USB disk I made a new directory and moved the system copy into that directory. Nothing new, all has been done before.

Then I restored W7-starter on my notebook, accepted the free W10 upgrade and that was it, ready!

Booting the W10 repair disk took an awful long time, so long that I first thought that it did not boot at all, for minutes only a blue W10 window. Take a coffee, relax, and.... a menu popped up. I connected the USB disk - the WindowsImageBackup directory was back on its original place before connecting it.

But nada NO BACKUP found.........
 
Solution
I suppose a couple of things. First, the backup image needs to be on the Root directory of the external drive. It can go on another directory if you are using a Network Location, but not usually a external drive.

Secondly, a new drive would be clean and not have a prior OS for the system to see. If it thinks you want to re-image Windows 7, that is what it looks for. You might try using Diskpart to clean the drive before you try to re-image back to Windows 10. Don't do this if you current drive contains the recovery for Windows 7.....

I haven't tried a repair disk, but you can download an .iso of the preview builds and use it install of the Repair Disk.. it may not be faster, however..
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I see what goes wrong.

I am trying to overwrite a W7 disk with my previous W10TP image.

The repair disk has new functionality. It detects the Windows versions currently installed on the C: drive.

You go thru some menus, find the option 'System Image Recovery' and select it.
Then you are asked 'Choose a target operating system' and you get the choice out of all previous detected versions.
W7 is now installed so the only option I get is restoring W7 - and until now I did not find a way to bypass it.
There is an option 'Command prompt' but then you are back at some DOS-interface without help.

How would you restore then to a brand new disk with nothing installed?

Maybe new functionality has been added, but with an extreme slow boot and I can't do what I want to do.
For now I rather had the previous repair disk back.
Waardeloos! (Dutch for useless)

Henk
 
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I suppose a couple of things. First, the backup image needs to be on the Root directory of the external drive. It can go on another directory if you are using a Network Location, but not usually a external drive.

Secondly, a new drive would be clean and not have a prior OS for the system to see. If it thinks you want to re-image Windows 7, that is what it looks for. You might try using Diskpart to clean the drive before you try to re-image back to Windows 10. Don't do this if you current drive contains the recovery for Windows 7.....

I haven't tried a repair disk, but you can download an .iso of the preview builds and use it install of the Repair Disk.. it may not be faster, however..
 
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Solution
Hi,

The image backup was on the root directory of the external drive!

On the second point, with the previous versions of the repair disk, at least in W7, you could delete partitions, make partitions and format partitions.

These tools are removed from the W10 repair disk. Maybe there is a DOS command from the Command Prompt option, but I could not find it and I did not find any help either.

Suppose you have a PC with a brand new / or replaced disk or a disk with a different version of Windows. Then you need to initialize the target disk. But the W10 repair disk does not have the tools to do that. I don't see that Diskpart is of any help in small systems with only one disk. I think you will have to go back to the installation media of the Windows of your choice and format the target disk, before you will be able to restore the system image. Or am I wrong?

I never thought of using the .iso for formatting the target disk and restoring the system image backup. I will look into that.
Thanks,

Henk
 
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