AOMEI not retoring disk type when changing from MBR to GPT
I have been experimenting with a spare system. I have installed Windows 8.1 64 in both legacy and UEFI mode.
I have noticed that AOMEI will not restore the MBR when backing up and restoring a Windows 8.1 leagcy mode installation. It requires that you find and boot to the installation media and do a reapir in order to get a bootable system.
I have also found that AOMEI will not change the disk type to GPT when the disk was previously used as an MBR installation.
After I restored (and fixed) the WIndows 8.1 64 bit legacy / MBR system. I then blew off all the parititons with AOMEI Parititon Assistant. I then restored from a previous WIndows 64 UEFI / GPT backup I made a few days ago. It too would not boot. A repair would not work either. Booting to a PE and looking at the disk I saw that it was marked as an MBR disk. I converted it to GPT using AOMEI Partition Assitant while the disk was mounted in another PC. Putting it back in the test machine and tried to boot. It still would not boot. This time however a repair from the install media did work and it booted.
I understand that switching from a legacy / MBR to a UEFI / GPT disk layout is unusual. I do have to wonder if restroring from a UEFI / GPT backup will work on a NEW disk that has never been converted to GPT. This worries me as quite a few people that might be running UEFI / GPT might have to replace a disk. This seems to be a failure of the AOMEI software.
Four things need to be addressed:
Restoartion of the proper boot device. MBR or GPT. AOMEI seems NOT to be restoring the boot sectors or sequence correctly.
Restoring the correct DISK TYPE (MBR or GPT) when doing a restoration
Restoring a full system backup fails due to AOMEI complaining there is not enough disk space, even though the backup came from the same disk. This has been reported elsewhere on this forum.
Fully backing up and restoring the MBR on legacy systems. This too has been reported elsewhere on this forum.
Comments
As for Q1, are boot sectors on the same disk as C(OS) drive?
As for Q2, our dev team is working on it. And we will improve it in the future versions.
As for Q3,you can restore partition by partiton. it will solve the issue.
Yes, the boot sectors is on the one and only disk, this was a FULL DISK backup and restore.
And the solution to restore partition by partition is not really an answer, this mysterious "not fitting" issue needs to be solved.
Hi Rootman,
Sorry that MultCloud is not able to recognize the type(MBR/GPT) of the destination disk when you restore a backup. So you must make sure that the system backup is restored on the relevant type of destinetion disk yourself.
As for restoring system backup failure, we have released a new version of Backupper, you can download the software via this link: http://www.backup-utility.com/download.html We have fixed this problem in the new version.
You also mentioned that you restore a full disk backup, but it didn't work, could you please tell us what the error message is when you boot from the resotored disk? And please send us the log files, you can find the logs under the directory of Backupper installation folder. So we can know the problem better and analyze what caused this problem. Thank you for your understanding in advance. We will keep on making effort to impriving this software.