I cannot restore any system image which was created in Windows 10 v1709 using Backup and Restore.

I've been following this discussion with interest as I'm trying to decide what is a good strategy to try and mitigate the effects of a potential primary HDD failure. My HDD is > 5-years old, a 500-Gb Seagate Barracuda and to date three other Seagate's have failed. I have also been through the grief of having BSODs and having to have Win 10 repaired, which got my files back but then had to spend weeks recovering/getting it back to the way it was ("it" is a desktop PC with Asus MB, Intel i5 Win 10 Pro upgrade from Win 7 Pro 64-bit which was a clean OEM install in 2012). It also contains a lot of work going back many years.

I'm not in any way computer literate (C++ coder), but have so far been totally confused by cloning, mirrors, images etc. I do a file history type backup onto a NAS device routinely (that had two of the failed Seagate's until changed to WD Red).

My gut instinct was to go for a system image and recovery medium on a USB stick. But, there seem to be as many opinions on exactly how to do it as the number of Google searches done to date.

I have installed a second HDD (Western Digital Gold Enterprise SATA 1-Tb which is ready to go.

I have looked at Acronis TI Western Digital edition, but despite all the flack directed at MS, I thought by now, they should know how to safeguard their own operating system etc.

I always wondered why I was being directed to Win 7 for SIB and having seen "deprecated", "not supported", the doubts crept in.

However, having seen fg2001's items, I am more encouraged to use the Win 10 SIB.

From settings info on my PC

System type 64-bit OS, x64 processor

Edition Win 10 Pro

Version 1709

OS build 16299.309

I would be grateful for any advice on how to go, general strategy, third party methods. Re-boots scare me, but I just about know how to go through the BIOS settings, so the less stressful the better.

Thanks

Are you running Legacy Bios or UEFI ?

At your level of OS the Win 10 SIB should work fine with either one.

Since you are replacing an HDD perhaps you should have considered a 500 or 512GB  SSD to get a much better performance, but it is your choice.

From control panel File history, Create a windows system image backup on an external USB drive, make sure it is big enough to contain all you have on your current system drive.

Once you have the Image created, replace your current drive with the new WD.

Boot from a windows 10 Installation Media (build 16299.15 or 16299.125 DVD or USB) and use the repair your computer-troubleshoot-system image recovery to restore the image to the new drive. 

It should see the image to restore on your USB external drive where you saved it. Once the restore is complete it will boot on your new copied system.

Thanks for replying and hp2159m

fg2001

Systeminfo is showing BIOS  mode as BIOS (legacy) and Disk management is showing "Healthy" for the source and target HDD, so I take that to be not UEFI.

Ref the SDD vs HDD choice, I'm happy if it just works, so the possibly more reliable WD Enterprise was a compromise.

Just as an aside, working with EEPROMs in microcontrollers, where 100k write operations are the limit, I was wary of SDD's, but if I had a spare PC, I will try one. However, looking at the platter of  a dead Seagate which looks like the rings of Saturn, shows what can go wrong.

I find that the interminable delay in getting going after the last (3-2018) cumulative update was dumped on me far outweighs read/write speeds, but I take your point.

Just to clarify, I was proposing to put the recovery medium tool on a USB stick, and the SIB on the WD HDD - the WD is connected internally to the motherboard as a SATA drive. The only booting from a USB stick I have was installing Ubuntu on a dead Vista laptop.

Hopefully, it will not be needed, but with data going back to at least Win 98, I like to be prepared as best I can.

One other thought, can you hedge your bets and have say, Acronis TI and Win 10 SIB on the same target disk, or would there be a conflict?

Even with all the files I have, I'm only using about 33% of the C: drive (according to File Explorer properties).

Grateful for the help and restoring some faith in the MS product.

I've been following this discussion with interest as I'm trying to decide what is a good strategy to try and mitigate the effects of a potential primary HDD failure. My HDD is > 5-years old, a 500-Gb Seagate Barracuda and to date three other Seagate's have failed. I have also been through the grief of having BSODs and having to have Win 10 repaired, which got my files back but then had to spend weeks recovering/getting it back to the way it was ("it" is a desktop PC with Asus MB, Intel i5 Win 10 Pro upgrade from Win 7 Pro 64-bit which was a clean OEM install in 2012). It also contains a lot of work going back many years.

I'm not in any way computer literate (C++ coder), but have so far been totally confused by cloning, mirrors, images etc. I do a file history type backup onto a NAS device routinely (that had two of the failed Seagate's until changed to WD Red).

My gut instinct was to go for a system image and recovery medium on a USB stick. But, there seem to be as many opinions on exactly how to do it as the number of Google searches done to date.

I have installed a second HDD (Western Digital Gold Enterprise SATA 1-Tb which is ready to go.

I have looked at Acronis TI Western Digital edition, but despite all the flack directed at MS, I thought by now, they should know how to safeguard their own operating system etc.

I always wondered why I was being directed to Win 7 for SIB and having seen "deprecated", "not supported", the doubts crept in.

However, having seen fg2001's items, I am more encouraged to use the Win 10 SIB.

From settings info on my PC

System type 64-bit OS, x64 processor

Edition Win 10 Pro

Version 1709

OS build 16299.309

I would be grateful for any advice on how to go, general strategy, third party methods. Re-boots scare me, but I just about know how to go through the BIOS settings, so the less stressful the better.

Thanks

Are you running Legacy Bios or UEFI ?

At your level of OS the Win 10 SIB should work fine with either one.

Since you are replacing an HDD perhaps you should have considered a 500 or 512GB  SSD to get a much better performance, but it is your choice.

From control panel File history, Create a windows system image backup on an external USB drive, make sure it is big enough to contain all you have on your current system drive.

Once you have the Image created, replace your current drive with the new WD.

Boot from a windows 10 Installation Media (build 16299.15 or 16299.125 DVD or USB) and use the repair your computer-troubleshoot-system image recovery to restore the image to the new drive. 

It should see the image to restore on your USB external drive where you saved it. Once the restore is complete it will boot on your new copied system.

Thanks for replying and hp2159m

fg2001

Systeminfo is showing BIOS  mode as BIOS (legacy) and Disk management is showing "Healthy" for the source and target HDD, so I take that to be not UEFI.

Ref the SDD vs HDD choice, I'm happy if it just works, so the possibly more reliable WD Enterprise was a compromise.

Just as an aside, working with EEPROMs in microcontrollers, where 100k write operations are the limit, I was wary of SDD's, but if I had a spare PC, I will try one. However, looking at the platter of  a dead Seagate which looks like the rings of Saturn, shows what can go wrong.

I find that the interminable delay in getting going after the last (3-2018) cumulative update was dumped on me far outweighs read/write speeds, but I take your point.

Just to clarify, I was proposing to put the recovery medium tool on a USB stick, and the SIB on the WD HDD - the WD is connected internally to the motherboard as a SATA drive. The only booting from a USB stick I have was installing Ubuntu on a dead Vista laptop.

Hopefully, it will not be needed, but with data going back to at least Win 98, I like to be prepared as best I can.

One other thought, can you hedge your bets and have say, Acronis TI and Win 10 SIB on the same target disk, or would there be a conflict?

Even with all the files I have, I'm only using about 33% of the C: drive (according to File Explorer properties).

Grateful for the help and restoring some faith in the MS product.

You cannot put the SIB or any other backup on the same drive where you plan to restore it.

The restore will reformat the drive based on the original configuration so it would destroy your SIB.

Unless you plan to use 2 WD internal Sata, one for the Backup and a second one to replace your original Seagate system disk.

I don't know about Acronis, I had problems with it, in some cases I used the free version of Macrium to copy a drive to another or to save an Image and the restore it to a different drive, but you will need to prepare a Macrium bootable media (Based on Win PE) to restore the image.

I've been following this discussion with interest as I'm trying to decide what is a good strategy to try and mitigate the effects of a potential primary HDD failure. My HDD is > 5-years old, a 500-Gb Seagate Barracuda and to date three other Seagate's have failed. I have also been through the grief of having BSODs and having to have Win 10 repaired, which got my files back but then had to spend weeks recovering/getting it back to the way it was ("it" is a desktop PC with Asus MB, Intel i5 Win 10 Pro upgrade from Win 7 Pro 64-bit which was a clean OEM install in 2012). It also contains a lot of work going back many years.

I'm not in any way computer literate (C++ coder), but have so far been totally confused by cloning, mirrors, images etc. I do a file history type backup onto a NAS device routinely (that had two of the failed Seagate's until changed to WD Red).

My gut instinct was to go for a system image and recovery medium on a USB stick. But, there seem to be as many opinions on exactly how to do it as the number of Google searches done to date.

I have installed a second HDD (Western Digital Gold Enterprise SATA 1-Tb which is ready to go.

I have looked at Acronis TI Western Digital edition, but despite all the flack directed at MS, I thought by now, they should know how to safeguard their own operating system etc.

I always wondered why I was being directed to Win 7 for SIB and having seen "deprecated", "not supported", the doubts crept in.

However, having seen fg2001's items, I am more encouraged to use the Win 10 SIB.

From settings info on my PC

System type 64-bit OS, x64 processor

Edition Win 10 Pro

Version 1709

OS build 16299.309

I would be grateful for any advice on how to go, general strategy, third party methods. Re-boots scare me, but I just about know how to go through the BIOS settings, so the less stressful the better.

Thanks

Are you running Legacy Bios or UEFI ?

At your level of OS the Win 10 SIB should work fine with either one.

Since you are replacing an HDD perhaps you should have considered a 500 or 512GB  SSD to get a much better performance, but it is your choice.

From control panel File history, Create a windows system image backup on an external USB drive, make sure it is big enough to contain all you have on your current system drive.

Once you have the Image created, replace your current drive with the new WD.

Boot from a windows 10 Installation Media (build 16299.15 or 16299.125 DVD or USB) and use the repair your computer-troubleshoot-system image recovery to restore the image to the new drive. 

It should see the image to restore on your USB external drive where you saved it. Once the restore is complete it will boot on your new copied system.

Thanks for replying and hp2159m

fg2001

Systeminfo is showing BIOS  mode as BIOS (legacy) and Disk management is showing "Healthy" for the source and target HDD, so I take that to be not UEFI.

Ref the SDD vs HDD choice, I'm happy if it just works, so the possibly more reliable WD Enterprise was a compromise.

Just as an aside, working with EEPROMs in microcontrollers, where 100k write operations are the limit, I was wary of SDD's, but if I had a spare PC, I will try one. However, looking at the platter of  a dead Seagate which looks like the rings of Saturn, shows what can go wrong.

I find that the interminable delay in getting going after the last (3-2018) cumulative update was dumped on me far outweighs read/write speeds, but I take your point.

Just to clarify, I was proposing to put the recovery medium tool on a USB stick, and the SIB on the WD HDD - the WD is connected internally to the motherboard as a SATA drive. The only booting from a USB stick I have was installing Ubuntu on a dead Vista laptop.

Hopefully, it will not be needed, but with data going back to at least Win 98, I like to be prepared as best I can.

One other thought, can you hedge your bets and have say, Acronis TI and Win 10 SIB on the same target disk, or would there be a conflict?

Even with all the files I have, I'm only using about 33% of the C: drive (according to File Explorer properties).

Grateful for the help and restoring some faith in the MS product.

You cannot put the SIB or any other backup on the same drive where you plan to restore it.

The restore will reformat the drive based on the original configuration so it would destroy your SIB.

Unless you plan to use 2 WD internal Sata, one for the Backup and a second one to replace your original Seagate system disk.

I don't know about Acronis, I had problems with it, in some cases I used the free version of Macrium to copy a drive to another or to save an Image and the restore it to a different drive, but you will need to prepare a Macrium bootable media (Based on Win PE) to restore the image.

Thanks for clarifying fg2001

This is the scenario - existing primary HDD crashes.

So if I understand it now, I need something like a USB stick with recovery medium created from the old Win 7 backup and restore.

I also need something like an internal HDD or DVDs with the system image on it.

I also need the new replacement HDD.

As luck has it, I have a second new HDD (WD Black 500-Gb) connected to the MB SATA.

I put the system image onto the WD Black

When disaster strikes, I boot up from the USB stick

Presumably I get an option to choose the location and date of the SIB (on the WD Black)

I then get an option of where to restore the image to (WD Enterprise)

All being well, next time I boot up (assuming the boot order has been set) the PC will reboot from the WD Enterprise which is now the primary drive.

hi ive had window update icon on the window but somehow its gone and some thing comes up and say sign out and sign in again . I try but the computer says the system is on temporary window please let me know what I have to do.

thanks

Thanks for clarifying fg2001

This is the scenario - existing primary HDD crashes.

So if I understand it now, I need something like a USB stick with recovery medium created from the old Win 7 backup and restore.

I also need something like an internal HDD or DVDs with the system image on it.

I also need the new replacement HDD.

As luck has it, I have a second new HDD (WD Black 500-Gb) connected to the MB SATA.

I put the system image onto the WD Black

When disaster strikes, I boot up from the USB stick

Presumably I get an option to choose the location and date of the SIB (on the WD Black)

I then get an option of where to restore the image to (WD Enterprise)

All being well, next time I boot up (assuming the boot order has been set) the PC will reboot from the WD Enterprise which is now the primary drive.

Tigger11,

The windows 7 reference is just a confusing name, this is a SIB for windows 10.

 The recovery medium can simply be the Windows 10 installation DVD or on a USB stick at build level 16299.125 that you can download directly from Microsoft, or you could use a recovery disk created after you completed your backup.

I assume your primary HDD is on Sata port 0 and it is disk C: and the second internal HDD is on Sata port 1 and it is disk D:.

So using the function on file history you created a good Windows Image Backup and saved it on your D: disk.

Now your primary disk fails and you replace it with a new one on Sata port 0.

Boot from the DVD or USB recovery disk and go to " Repair your computer " - Troubleshhot -System Image Recovery - Windows 10, then it will show you which image you have available to restore (Usually the latest or you can select which one you want)  proceding from there it will format your new  C: drive and restore the image on it.

After the restore is complete it will reboot your freshly restored system.