Windows image backup saga

[WannaMurderMicrosoft]

So all started when I tried to boot from a HDD that I had the Windows 11 installed.

It was asking me for a PIN that I don't remember putting there.

Anyway I decided it's not important and that I would just delete the installation.

However I had other stuff on the HDD also that I wanted to keep and they were many GB in size.

I didn't want to just format it and then rewrite them, but how would I delete the Windows folder?

I tried twice with the IObit unlocker but every time after deleting a bunch of files it stopped.

I decided that I would call it a day and format and rewrite the data tomorrow.

I put my PC to sleep and I went to sleep too.

But in the mid of the night something happened.

The power went down.

And my PC went from sleep to off.

Next morning, unaware of the calamity that is about to happen, I turned on my PC and it, as it always happens on those cases, decided to boot from the corrupted Windows 11 installation instead of my main Windows 10 SSD.

It failed of course, but Windows wouldn't be Windows if they didn't spread their corruption from the Windows 11 installation to the 10, which is on a different drive BTW...

Luckily for me I had sense that something bad was about to happen and I had an Image backup of my Windows 10 from yesterday.

Or was I?...

I had never used an image backup before but I didn't imagine Microsoft would F$%& up a simple thing as that.

But that's exactly what they did.

The Image restore didn't finish,probably because of a corrupted boot sector, which is why you make an Image backup in the first place!

I thought hard what to do next.

The Image backup comes in 3 partitions so I thought if I could replace those partitions manually it could work, but that made things even worse.

Then I deleted all the partitions of the SSD and gave it a go, but surprise!, Image restore doesn't work on an empty drive.

Then I remembered an old 40GB SSD that had a Windows 10 installation on it.

I cloned that on my M.2 NVMe and at last the Image restore worked.

As a bonus it restored all the partitions of my SSD even those I had not backed up, those were empty of course, but I took care of it.

 

In the end I ended up to be a lot less font of the Windows Image backup than I was.

But it's great that those backups can be mounted and just take any file you like.

I don't know if the same can be done with other backups.