Win 10 Boot Manager / Loader Help

[damnfinecoffee]

28 minutes ago, Jimkirk363 said:

@damnfinecoffeeU can do it to a different Partition or the same drive, just rename the folder your installing windows to.

Not sure how to do that during install. You’re installing windows to a drive though aren’t you? Not just a specific folder.. sorry if I’m. It really following you here.

 

To be honest if I can’t get back to my original files and applications I’m not sure what installing a secondary copy of windows would achieve, may as well just bite the bullet and clean install if there’s nothing else I can do to fix this.

[damnfinecoffee]

Does anyone have any last ditch effort solutions I could try before giving up and doing a clean install?

[damnfinecoffee]

So I found a restore image I made when I first built this pc a couple of years ago. It’s on an external USB 3 drive.

 

i plugged the drive in, booted to recovery via the window DVD, chose restore from image..

 

it found the image on the drive and stated the following:

 

I clicked next to begin, the restore started, and then this:

 

 

urgh!

 

I tried first formatting the SSD via diskpart and also just creating one big partition and setting it as active. No joy. I also tried starting the windows install and allowing it to create the partitions, I then quit and ran the image restore again, same issue.

 

Please help!

[Jimkirk363]

@damnfinecoffee You may have a faulty drive or possibly a ram issue.

[damnfinecoffee]

12 hours ago, Jimkirk363 said:

@damnfinecoffee You may have a faulty drive or possibly a ram issue.

I don’t think it’s hardware, I’ve just managed to do a clean install of windows 10 in the hope that I could then restore from the image.

 

Windows 10 all up and running fine, created a bootable USB restore to get into recovery environment, booted into that, went to image restore, it sees the image, click next, warns about formatting the disk, next.. and:

 

[damnfinecoffee]

What’s also interesting is if I look in the backup and restore settings in windows it doesn’t actually see the image. Even though I can see it’s there on the attached USB drive:

 

 

[damnfinecoffee]

I finally fixed it!

 

It turns out that if your hardware isn’t EXACTLY as it was when you made the disk image then the image won’t restore.

 

I had since installed a 10gbe NIC, and discovered that as soon as I removed this and tried to restore the image again.. bingo!

 

 

[Shinon214]

not sure if it works for you, I did had this issue when I was cloning an OS drive to another, when I booted the cloned drive it became like that, same issue as yours. it turned out I wasn't using the "migrate" method of cloning.
let's call this failed cloned OS drive "OS FAIL DRIVE"

 

most of my methods requires another PC and another drive.
1. Put the drive into another pc and use partition wizard its free btw and align the partition
https://www.partitionwizard.com/help/align-partition.html
put it back to the pc and try to boot, else proceed to 2

2. get cloning software that can migrate OS, idk any free one even if there is I haven't tested the free.
I've tested it on acronis 2019 and created rescue media on USB.

booted on USB and cloned/migrate the "OS FAIL DRIVE" to "New DRIVE"
I removed "OS FAIL DRIVE" leaving "New DRIVE" connected only

for some reason the "New DRIVE"" that cloned/migrate from "OS FAIL DRIVE" worked and booted fine. I removed "New DRIVE"  and plug-in back "OS FAIL DRIVE" it still have same issue as yours.