System restore failed
I was using Windows 7 before and did a full system backup using backupper.
I have since done a clean re-install with windows 10 and also done a system backup of that using backupper.
Now I needed to use windows 7 for a specific task and thought I could restore windows 7, do my thing, and restore windows 10 again. This failed bigtime.
I had earlier performed a system restore test using USB stick and the backupper linux bootable tool without a problem for windows 7.
When I tried this time it did not wipe my drive before restoring, but simply added new partitions to my windows 10 and rendered whole drive useless, as it would still just try to boot from, a now broken, win 10 system drive.
In the operations summary page you suggest fiddling with "resize partition size", I presume to perhaps delete current partitions before restoring? But this option wasn't even available for me. All I could do was chose "allign for SSD drive" or some such thing.
Also the USB stick was not bootable with UEFI, I guess I made a linux USB stick before. I recreated the USB stick using the Windows PE and will attempt to restore system from my windows 10 backup. If that doesn't work .... meh. I will have to reinstall windows 10 for the third time!!
Comments
I don't understand why it only allows me to select a PARTITION for destination when I want to system restore. Why can't i select a DRIVE?
Makes no sense to me.
I have 3 drives. 250gb ssd, 500gb ssd, and a 6tb wd red. I have now a fresh install of windows 10 on the 250gb, and fresh install of windows 7 on the 500gb. Also have my full system backup images from both windows 7 and 10 on my 6tb drive.
I have a USB stick made with your utility. The linux version, since the windows PE didn't work.
So I would really like to restore my windows 10 system. HOW? This system restore doesn't seem to work at all. I don't understand it, cause like a year ago I tested this on windows 7 and it was super easy and simple and worked.
It is a bug that when it needs to restore three partitions in the GPT/UEFI case, it squeezes them into where one partition was.
I suggest you do, for your Windows 7 job, this from Windows bootable media
bcdboot c:\windows /L en-US
where c: might be a different letter, you have to find which drive letter is the OS partition. bcdboot is the right command to make an OS partition bootable. You can use a Windows install disk and go into command prompt. Linux won't do it.
After that, before restoring Windows 10, I suggest you clean the disk, using diskpart, from the bootable media, and convert to GPT (always be careful not to clean the disk where the backup is, and asking again if you are not fluent with diskpart).
Boot relationships in UEFI are tricky, I studied it a time.
Reading a bit more: you obviously do have Windows install media. Use these to boot, instead of the Backupper bootable media, to exercise on the bcdboot and diskpart commands. I also know that AOMEI ISO bootable media do work. I can't say it for AOMEI sticks. These advices can be given.
The windows 7 part is over with, went the long way around with reinstalling on my secondary drive etc. Now I would like my windows 10 back - AND have a fast/easy way to restore a win10 backup in the future without having to do diskpart and what not. Before it was super easy. Pop in the USB stick and boot on it, choose the image to restore from, select drive to restore to - and done.
Why is it so tricky now?
Also the windows bootable media didn't work. I can't boot on it. Only the linux one works.
I tried to use Windows 10 USB installer, and go as far as to delete all partitions on the 250gb drive, cancel the windows install, then pop in the linux bootable and do the restore but that didn't work either.
I will use Windows install media (USB) to boot up, run diskpart during install, clean the 250gb and create a new partition (correct?).
Then it should be ready for restoring my windows 10 system backup image?
That should work with both using program from my windows 7 drive, or using the Linux bootable USB?
at step 2 you need command prompt from the bootable media, for example from the windows setup stick.
at step 5 you need to select your 250GB or 500GB disk, instead of disk 2.
select disk #
after step 6 clean you need step 6a
convert gpt
and exit (leaves diskpart). The rest of your instructions was for how to make a Windows setup stick, not to prepare a hard disk, and you don't want to do this.
After that you may do a restore from bootable media or from the Windows 7 OS, it should not matter, as you proposed.
After that you have a dual-boot system, and unfortunately also a dual-bootmanager-system. You have a boot manager on the 250GB disk, and a boot manager on the 500GB disk. UEFI boots into one of them, and said boot manager then boots into the OS'es it knows of.. It is better to disconnect the wrong disk, and use bcdboot see above. (this will straight out: uefi ("uefi boot manager") boots into the right "windows boot manager", "windows boot manager" boots into the right "windows OS")
Ok I think I got it.
Disconnect my windows 7 (500gb) SSD
Boot from windows installer, shift+f10 > command prompt
diskpart
list disk
select disk # (the 250gb)
clean
convert gpt
create partition primary
select partition 1
formart fs=ntfs quick
active
exit
exit
reboot using the linux bootable media, run system restore using Windows 10 image, point to 250gb partition
Reboot on the 250gb
SUCCESS! (I hope)
Shut down PC, connect 500gb drive, boot up on Windows install USB, go through diskpart again to clean the 500gb, then reboot on windows 10. and I shouldn't have any dual bootmanagers present.
I know I can skip the 'active' part cause i don't need it to be bootable, but what about GPT?
diskpart
list disk
select disk # (the 250gb)
clean
convert gpt
exit
exit
you don't need to create a partition (unless AOMEI Backupper is crazy). you can't say active on a gpt disk.
If reboot on the 250GB does not work, you must disconnect the 500GB and do bcdboot.
to clean the 500GB disk you can do this from Windows 10, but only after Windows 10 boots.
Ok I will give it a whirl, thanks for your help
Also I would still like to know if it's no longer possible to do an easy backup/restore using windows 10.
You said there was a bug. "It is a bug that when it needs to restore three partitions in the GPT/UEFI case, it squeezes them into where one partition was."
To answer your questions: windows 7 and windows 10 are the same regarding these issues. On your UEFI motherboard, not laptop, both are installed on GPT disks. I could imagine you did the windows 7 test on a different computer? or simply were more lucky.
From my tests it is always troublesome, with AOMEI Backupper and in principle how UEFI and Windows are designed to boot a computer. It is not possible to do a fully automatic restore, but aomei and others do something automatically.
Just to give you an idea about restore: in Windows 7 we had Create system image. It worked reliably, but managing images was impossible. In Windows 8 and Windows 10, Microsoft does not offer a native backup solution. The repair they offer is a refresh that looses your apps, or create bootable media that looses your data and all apps. In the server world, bare metal recovery is also not easy, they prefer to do virtual machine backup or even just file backup.
(You may also try Macrium Reflect, it has a different philosphy, but it confronts you with a lot of hexadecimal digits).
To me that sounds like it doesn't support windows 10 then.
I had no problems in windows 7, and it was on the same computer, same specs.
Anyway, I give up on this restore. The linux bootable gave "boot error!" all of the sudden now also, so I booted up on the windows 7 to run Backupper restore from there. It completed the restore, but trying to boot up on the 250gb windows 10 just gave Boot error also.
You said I should run bcdboot if I was not able to boot.
Didn't get that to work either. Booted on windows install, command prompt, ran bcdboot
bcdboot x:\windows /L en-US
But just gave error. c:\ was the 6tb drive, i checked using c: d: e: x: and browsing around to find which drive had the windows files on them.
So I was just "lucky" that system backup/restore worked before? WoW, not exactly a sales pitch for a backup program which sole purpose is to be reliable
For now I will just do another fresh windows 10 install and go through installing all app and shit and try to figure out another reliable way to make backup of my PC
Maybe system backup is useless, but disc clone is better?
If this is a known bug.. and windows 10 is creeping up on 1 year now and windows 7/UEFI combo for god knows how long, how come you don't put a GIANT disclaimer in your program when trying to restore "Hey, we can see you are using GPT/UEFI, so our shit don't work, stop what you are doing immediately!!"
Well by pure magic I managed to finally restore the windows 10. I ran the bcdboot from windows 7 again and now it was successful and allowed me to boot into the windows10 drive. But doesn't leave me anymore confident in any future backupper endevaours i must admit![:\](https://www.aomeitech.com/forum/resources/emoji/confused.png ":\")
So for future reference, to even attempt a system restore I must expect to have a windows media install usb ready together with a backupper usb media (and hope it works.. both the windows PE and linux has failed me today).
Use the windows installer, to diskpart clean and convert to GPT, restore the system image, again boot into windows installer and run bcdboot (hope that works too, also failed me). and THEN we are good to go. Quite the mission.
Good that it boots now, with your restored Windows 10.
I do have these remarks:
It cannot be bcdboot x:\windows /L en-US. (x: is the drive letter of Windows PE). One has to find the drive letter of your OS partition, as seen in Windows PE.
You may need to run bcdboot again after removing the 500GB disk. It could be the case, that bcdboot stored your Windows 10 boot data onto the 500GB disk, instead of the 250GB disk. It could be that firmware still boots into the 500GB disk, instead of into the 250GB disk. One should have a look in Disk Management see on which disk is the partition with "system" attribute. It is impossible to say from distance without sitting at your computer.
There is no difference between Windows 7 and Windows 10, as long as it is UEFI and GPT disk is involved. It is the same layout and technology, and the same troubles may arise.
I know that CD, burned from ISO, does work. It is unfortunate that sticks are not properly created, because it is easy to do once one does have an ISO.
@paradoks, sorry for the late reply because of the holidays.
"Now I needed to use windows 7 for a specific task and thought I could restore windows 7, do my thing, and restore windows 10 again. This failed bigtime."
You failed to restore or you restore it successfully but cannot boot your Windows 10?
"When I tried this time it did not wipe my drive before restoring, but simply added new partitions to my windows 10 and rendered whole drive useless,"
If you restore the system backup, it just wipes the partition you choose as the destination.
For the new partition, maybe it is the restore system partition, right?
Because when you do the system backup, it will backup all the partitions which are related with the system such as the boot and system partition. But if you do not retstore to the orignal location, it cannot be restored to orignal partition location. You just can choose one partition as the destination and the software will restore all your several partition to this location.
"I don't understand why it only allows me to select a PARTITION for destination when I want to system restore. Why can't i select a DRIVE"
If you do the system backup, two cases for you.
1, You do the system backup and do not change the partition or re-install other system in this disk. When you do the restore, the software will choose the location for you auomatically. That is to say, all the partitions will be restored to the orignal location.
2, You do the system backup and there is some changing in the disk. You just can choose one partition as the destination. And the software will restore the several partitions which are related with system to this location.
Only you do the disk backup, you can choose the the disk as the destination.
BTW, thanks Peter.
I know this was a year ago but I'm having the same trouble in July 2017 with my new installation of Backupper. I can save a restore file with both the System (active and bootable) and C:/Win10 partitions. But when I go to "restore" I am forced to choose a partition to restore to, rather than a drive. If I select partition C:/ to restore to, then BOTH the System and C:/Win10 partitions are restored to that, creating two new partitions. So I end up with TWO System partitions on the drive - the newly restored one and the original one. This confuses the boot process - my drive did eventually boot after a very long delay and I was then able to delete the original - and now redundant - System partition. But this is very clunky. Why does Backupper force you to choose a partition to restore a system to? Surely you want to restore the system to a complete drive, not a single partition on that drive?
Restoring a system should be done on an empty disk. Clean it first with Windows Diskpart if it is a used disk holding other partitions.
@chrisj If there are no partition changes, you don't need to choose the destination manually:
If Backupper detects partition changes, you'll have to choose the destination manually. In this case, please delete all system-related partitions before the restore progress.
Delete 3, including the protected partitions, out of 4 partitions?
The Windows DIsk Management tool can’t normally delete these partitions, and you’ll see the “Delete Volume” option grayed out.
In that case you probably need Aomei Partition Assistant Bootable media.
http://www.disk-partition.com/help/delete-partition.html
Diskparts Clean command would erase ALL partitions, including E: Data in the screenshot example.
https://www.howtogeek.com/215349/how-to-remove-an-efi-system-partition-or-gpt-protective-partition-from-a-drive-in-windows/
Referring to Admin's reply about not needing to choose a partition to restore to if there are no partition changes......I backed up by using "System Restore" so this meant that only the System and C:/ drives were backed up. The drive I was backing up had 4 partitions, so I guess that as far as Backupper was concerned there had been partition changes. Should I instead have backed up using Disk Backup so that all 4 original partitions would be backed up? If I did this, would Backupper then restore all 4 partitions to the drive while 'wiping' the original partitions?
@chrisj Yes, Disk Restore will wipe original partitions.
Using Win 10. Did system and disk backup to external hard drive.AOMEI recgnizes file in restore but when I try to use I get "cannot find file". Tried to import file using path G:\My Backups\System Backup(1) but get message that it is wrong path even though the file exists at that location. Please help as I have a compromized computer and dont know how long I can use it
Thanks!
@rrman Please try to restore in Backupper WinPE.