System Image Recovery - Can't find System Image

You call it the Repair Disk!  Instead of all that clicking and hassle, just insert the repair disk, and choose restore from a system image.  It will find your external drive with the backup immediately.

Windows cannot find a system image on this computer

Any of these 5things will cause this error message, or prevent Images from being found on a USB drive.  If these items aren't the cause of the problem, you can restore your Windows System Image using Acronis, including the free 30 trial of Acronis Home 2012.

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But first, if you get this error message or if some but not all System Images are displayed from the Recovery Boot Disk, check these details.  

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1. Make sure the folder named "WindowsImageBackup" is still in the root of the USB drive where it was originally created. Like g:\WindowsImageBackup

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2. make sure the folder for each computer image is still the system name of the PC, the way it was originally created. If you rename a folder the image (and other images on the same drive) will not be found. So the full path will be like g:\WindowsImageBackup\your-pc

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3. make sure you haven't added any other folders in the "WindowsImageBackup" folder unless they are disk images of other computers. Any other folder (like an empty folder) that is aphabetically ahead of a Windows Image Folder will prevent all alphabetically trailing System Images from being found.

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4. If you have multiple system images on one USB drive and rename the mediaID file on any of the images, then all images alphabetically trailng the one with the renamed mediaID file will not be found.

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5. USB Flash Drive

For some reason, Flash drives don't seem to work for making or recovering from an image with Windows imaging but you can use Acronis True Image Home 2012 to recover a Windows System Image that has been copied to a Flash Drive.

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If nothing above works, you may have a corrupt mediaId file. Download Acronis which will allow you to recover the Windows System Image 1 partition at a time directly from the .vhd files in your WindowsImageBackup folder. 

Use Acronis to recover the 100M reserved partition first, then drive c:\ etc. This works well for recovering to the original partitioned hard drive but not to a blank hard drive. The BOOTMGR is missing on startup when I try restoring to a new hard drive. When this happens, the usual tools for fixing the BOOTMGR have not worked for me.

The recovery boot disk that you can create from the free 30 day free trial version of Acronis Home 2012 works for recovering partitions from a Windows System Image. If you benefit from using Acronis, you should probably buy it for $49.00.

When using Acronis to recover partitions its confusing because the drive letters for the partitions are not displayed correctly in the Acronis interface. You have to identify the target partitions by knowing their sizes which are displayed. This happens because the 100M reserved is displayed with a drive letter in Acronis, but of course it does not have a drive letter in Windows.

Thank you very much!!! This was just perfect! I knew about issues around the folder names, but I didn't know about problems using flash memory (Micro SD)!!!

I just had an external USB 3.0 BitLocker Locked HDD with a folder with my backup and, once I unlocked the drive, the image showed to me like magic! Your advice is great and very consistent, I really recommend it to anybody facing issues with Windows Image Backups previously saved!

My case was hard because it was the original Windows 8.1 that came with an Asus Transformer T100 Tablet/Laptop/Notebook that only boots UEFI 32 bit and won't start Acronis True Image at all (I also made a backup with it, useless though)!

I know question was posted long ago, I will answer two problems that I faced during recovery from System Image. I hope this could save someones time.

When System Image is on the external drive:

In this case supposed to made or stored system image on external hard drive. If you ever need to recover from here just boot you system with windows 7 bootable, or DVD and go to repair. Select option saying about Restore from system image, plug in you eternal hdd to the system. and it will find WindowsSystemImage and rest follow the wizard you will be done. You may face some problem if you have changed folder name of the WindowsSystemImage and you have to revert your folder name back to orginal, otherwise otherwise system will not recognize folder congaing system image.  So far so good lets now focus on how to restore if WindowsSystemImage is stored on the NAS drive,process is quite similar to simple external drive but you must access your NAS. When you go to advance option and select image from network  you will face "network location cannot be reached see windows help 0x800704cf in recovery mode" it means you dont have Network driver, once your enter (\server\share) address It will ask you for password and user name for the NAS in case if it is protected. and  will through you an error about "network location cannot be reached see windows help 0x800704cf ". Now its time to load your driver. How to load driver is our next question, if you go to load driver option and which is just beneath select Select system image from network storage select this option and now find .inf (system information file in Ethernet folder on the disk) once you load that file it will show you different drivers, load one compatible to your hardware and then you will be able to communicate to the drives over the network.  Rest is just follow wizard and you will be done.

ENCRYPTED DRIVE!

I had a problem with a Windows 7 machine that wouldn't boot and couldn't be repaired and was trying to re-image it from a Windows Image Backup.  Had the exact symptoms as described here.  Tried every fix and work-around in this thread and in others.  Even tried putting the files on a network share and went to the trouble of loading network drivers, etc.  Nothing worked.  

Later on I discovered that the PC had been running Dell Data Encryption.  External drives connected to that PC were encrypted.  All the files were visible and looked normal.  But they were all scrambled.  No wonder Windows couldn't see them!  

Anyway, if you've come to this thread with a similar problem find out if your system was using any type of encryption software.  Maybe my experience can save you a few gray hairs.