Problems restoring
I received a new PC recently. A Dell optiplex 3070. I installed Aomei standard and did 3 system backups. 1 after a fresh install. and 2 with various programs installed. Today I wanted to restore the fresh install for the first time to try something out. I initiated the restore via windows and let it do its thing. I selected system restore. Chose all 3 partitions and basically let it do everything. I only have 1 internal HD, plus the external which contained the image. It took a long time to do what it needed to do.
When the computer restarted, Dell's OS recovery came up. It did a hardware scan and found no errors and then it wanted to go online to download the restore image to reset the computer. It did not want to boot into windows. It absolutely refused to boot, nothing I could do. So for now, I am allowing Dell to do the automatic system restore (downloading via the internet, the image etc etc).
What did I do wrong? How can I get my images to work if i make a backup? Is there something I am not doing? I thought i should be able to simply choose restore, select my system restore image that I want and then let it automatically do what it needed to do, reboot and everything would come back up.
Comments
After that, you can press F12 to boot from the WinPE media. Then, you can delete all system partitions on the disk, then perform the restore again.
You can simply use diskpart:
2TB drives and smaller: (or MBR drive)
2.5TB drives and larger: (or any GPT drive)
I've been testing Aomie on a vanilla Windows install that I don't mind breaking. If you make a true disc image i.e sector by sector copy, that's a mirror and any file corruptions will get backed up. I haven't tried it with Aomie, but acronis has a safety feature - if the hdd has a corrupted format it spits out a corruption error and you have to checkdsk it first before the backup.
When I created my Aomie recovery discs on CD (WinPEbot & Aomieboot) the write process bombed at the end but the tray ejected and the burns were good. However, numerous event errors related to the operation were logged afterwards so something is a bit flaky?
If you use Rufus to create your bootable flash drive using a disc image and go the Linux option, it's no longer a Windows FAT drive but a bootable Linux flavour Ext4 or similar and can't normally be read on in Windows. That doesn't matter because it's only there to boot up Aomies restore app. catalogue your drives and find the Aomie backup file image.
Even though I created Aomie bootable media and have set it to boot first in AMI bios, I often have to press F8 during bios boot to make sure I'm booting from it. Once you see their code running through and after a (long) wait, the Aomie restore screen eventually appears asking for the backup file. That's another downside of not using a fast protected partition - booting anything from cheap chinese flash memory with read times as slow as 10mb/S can take forever. There was a previous comment about using large USB drive when 650mB on a CD is plenty cos they only use about 411mb. The bigger the flash the larger the block size making it slower reading small files. IMHO most problems are OS file corruption and a protected partion rarely gets destroyed unless the disc itself is bad.
I assumed Aomie would boot from a protected hidden partition which was my first mistake, I chose restore and ignored the screen wanting the recovery disc, which fortunately I had created. I don't know if their disc is keyed to one PC with its mobo drivers or portable allowing the same disc to recover an image saved on another PC, I could test that? Aomie appeared to 'restore' or so it seemed without the recovery disc, but at Windows re-boot I got the Windows Manager black boot screen up and nada. That was the lightbulb moment whe I realized that Aomie cannot restore without a working recovery disc, which is a pain because their app. should never appear to do a restore without it.
I also had a Windows system backup and rescue CD as backup if Aomie failed. That has worked for me everytime without uncertainty.
I may be wrong, but if your recovery disc/media from that PC is ok AND you used Disk Backup (ALL sectors) it should restore as a cloned drive with the same format as before whatever it was. If you only backed up the C drive and not the small system file of about 100Mb at the start, Windows may not start. Then you have the problem of trying to create that. Check your BIOS settings, mine is set to UEFI but legacy compatible MBR so I can always boot a flash drive however it was formatted. If your BIOS is fixed at UEFI you can be fairly certain Windows installed as GPT by default, unless you converted it. If you still aren't sure, Rufus a bootable flash as UEFI and another as FAT32 to see what works. The last time I Rufused a UEFI boot flash, I had to copy some small files across from another working Windows PC for a uefi boot.
Hope some of this helps.
I agree some of the option choices are hard to understand and not always where you expect them. As with other backup recovery apps you have to try them out and make sure what you get after recovery is what you expect. On a non-critical Windows PC with not a lot on it, I would find and save the licence info, create the Windows recovery media (and test it!) then do a Windows full backup (clone) to another drive to use if Aomie didn't backup and restore as expected. Too many people set up the backup scheme and schedule only to find months later they can't recover. I had this happen with Acronis. Their default backup is always C and you have to add additional drives to the profile. In my case backing up the OS drive C and not D with dependent apps recovered a non working system. The worst thing MS ever did with Windows was to allow app developers to store their data inside the Windows OS structure.
I remember when creating USB sticks with Rufus et Al to boot recovery tools with the bios set to UEFI, I had to add some folders & files to the stick which I copied from a working windows drive formatted UEFI. The stick has efi system files on it making it different to a normal bootable FAT memory stick, but it still boots in a non-efi system.