Question Odd happening with recent Windows 11 Pro image back up/restore

[liberty610]

Hi all.

I believe I have fixed this issue, but I would like to share my experience on this so I can understand better what happened and why it happened. I have multiple SSD drives in in my system. I have a Gigabyte X570 xtreme motherboard with all 3 M.2 SSD slots filled, along with 3 other SATA SSDs connected. I have been using the program EasusToDo to back up my windows 11 drive in case my system drive fails or if I want to upgrade my system drive.. It has come in handy plenty of the last couple years for both tasks.

So, my main C drive was on a fairly new 8tb WD Black SSD M.2 4.0 PCIe drive. I also have a 2 TB Gigabyte M.2 SSD 4.0 PCIe drive I was using for secondary storage. I wanted to swap these two drives so Windows was on the smaller 2TB drive. I was only using a little over 1TB of the 8TB as the Windows boot drive, so the rest of the drive was being wasted. If I started to add random data to the 8tb drive with windows on it, that would mean the EasusToDo back ups would need to be made on a larger drive and back up ALL the data on it, which is a pain. I already have a NAS device to backup general data. So I wanted to make the 2tb Gigabyte drive my main boot drive and just use the 8tb for general storage.

So I backed up all the data on the 2tb Gigabyte drive to my NAS unit and then formatted the entire drive. I then made my EasusToDo image back up of my Windows OS drive from the 8tb drive. I then made my EasusToDo boot image on a USB stick and booted into EasusToDo so I could load the image onto the smaller 2tb drive, which I did successfully.

When the OS image was successfully loaded onto the 2TB drive, I rebooted my system, went into the bios, and made sure the Gigabyte drive was the main drive in the boot order so it didn't try and boot into Windows using the original 8tb drive. Once I did that, I was booted into Windows from the now small 2tb drive and everything was in working order.

I then used Windows command prompt to successfully wipe and delete all the partitions on the 8tb drive so I could format it as one large partition to be used for general storage. So I then had Windows 11 Pro fully functional on my 2TB gigabyte drive, and my WD black 8tb was formatted and ready as a general storage drive. I did some other tasks on my PC after all of this, and everything was fine. Then I did a reboot, and that's when things went weird.

When it rebooted, it didn't load into Windows. I got a blue recovery screen and it would not boot. I went into BIOS and everything was normal there. The gigabyte drive was the main OS drive to boot from and nothing else was changed. I could NOT get Windows back up and running, even with a Windows 11 USB boot drive. I then tried re-installing Windows to see if it would just do a fresh install, and during the early portions of the install process, I got a warning message that popped up and said my PC didn't meet the requirements to run Windows 11, which obviously it did because I have been on Windows 11 for several years now with this build. I checked to make sure TMP was on in the BIOS, which it was as well.

So, I decided that the next best plan was to boot back into EasusToDo and repeat process to get the backup image loaded back on to the 2tb Gigabyte drive. I did this, and then Windows booted normally from the 2tb drive, and my 8tb WD drive was still good to go as a general storage drive. For extra measure, I restarted my PC and successfully rebooted into windows just fine, and then took it a step further and did a full shut down. I then turned it back on and it booted normally. So I am assuming the issue is now resolved.

My question now is, why did it give me a recovery error message after it was working fine after the initial backup recovery? Was there something on that 8TB drive still that was still helping the boot process? Maybe something with the TMP? Because it stopped booting correctly only AFTER I wiped out that original 8tb drive and it's partitions. But I only wiped those partitions out AFTER I was already running Windows from the 2tb drive. I am just trying to understand what caused this so I can avoid doing it like this in the future.

Hopefully I explained it well enough! Thanks in advance for any feedback on this.

 

[USAFRet]

1. You could have done a clone, rather than an Image backup.

2. The very first boot with the new drive needs to be with only the new drive connected. Physical disconnection of all others, especially the original C drive.

 

[liberty610]

2. The very first boot with the new drive needs to be with only the new drive connected. Physical disconnection of all others, especially the original C drive.

That's what I would have done initially in the past, but I was trying to avoid taking my system apart while doing this. In order to remove all the other drives, I have to take out my graphics card, along with removing several screws to remove the M.2 drives as they are behind metal heat sink plates on this board.

The initial bootup on the 2tb drive went fine without any issues or removing of any of the drives. While I was booted into Windows off that drive, that's then that I went into command prompt and deleted all the partitions on the 8tb drive. I did all of that while I was working windows off the 2tb drive. It was after the successful boot and the formatting of the original C drive (the 8tb one) that the recovery screen popped up.

Then I reloaded the image file back onto the 2tb drive again, and now it's working fine.

 

[SkyNetRising]

why did it give me a recovery error message after it was working fine after the initial backup recovery?

After cloning for first boot from cloned drive old drive has to be physically disconnected.
If you fail to do this, then cloned drive gets messed up and you have to redo cloning.

Was there something on that 8TB drive still that was still helping the boot process?
Because it stopped booting correctly only AFTER I wiped out that original 8tb drive and it's partitions.

Most likely bootloader on cloned drive was still referencing old OS drive.
And when booting from new drive, OS was still loading from old drive.

But I only wiped those partitions out AFTER I was already running Windows from the 2tb drive.

Depends on, what software you were using for this "wiping" operation.
Some software requires a reboot for changes to commit.

 

[liberty610]

Depends on, what software you were using for this "wiping" operation.
Some software requires a reboot for changes to commit.

I just used windows command prompt to delete partitions and made the entire drive unallocated. Then set it up as a standard storage drive.