[SOLVED] Windows not detecting my USB device containing System Image; asking for drivers.

Erick Pena

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Jun 8, 2013
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I just did a Win10 clean install and want to make a System Image backup before putting my programs on the PC. I went to Control Panel > System and Security > Backup and Restore and user the “Create a system image” to create the image of the clean install.

I wanted to test to see if the image was working and would be recognized by going to Advanced Startup and booting into recovery environment and selected recovery from image.

The PC restarts and I get the menu to select the backup. By default it looks for a DVD drive, but there’s no backups listed as I don’t have an optical drive. I have the option to navigate to another location (Network or Disk). However, if I try to navigate to another drive/device, I am prompted to load drivers for these devices.

Without being able to load the driver, I can’t check to see the Image Backup works.

Why is windows asking me for drivers? How do I get access to USB devices on which my image is stored?

Can I just load a driver from my C://Windows/system32/drivers folder? I looked in device manager for my USB drivers and tried loading them during the System Image screen and it didn’t work.
 
Solution
wanted to test to see if the image was working and would be recognized by going to Advanced Startup and booting into recovery environment and selected recovery from image.
it's possible that for this type of image restore process you will need to run Backup & Restore from in the OS, not from it's advanced startup routine.

move the image to an internal disk and see if it works from there.
if so, you're just out of luck with this external USB option in this situation.

a better solution may be to use a 3rd party service for this.
Acronis True Image for example can boot and run from USB or DVD and can select backup images from anywhere connected.
wanted to test to see if the image was working and would be recognized by going to Advanced Startup and booting into recovery environment and selected recovery from image.
it's possible that for this type of image restore process you will need to run Backup & Restore from in the OS, not from it's advanced startup routine.

move the image to an internal disk and see if it works from there.
if so, you're just out of luck with this external USB option in this situation.

a better solution may be to use a 3rd party service for this.
Acronis True Image for example can boot and run from USB or DVD and can select backup images from anywhere connected.
 
Solution

Erick Pena

Distinguished
Jun 8, 2013
33
0
18,530
it's possible that for this type of image restore process you will need to run Backup & Restore from in the OS, not from it's advanced startup routine.

move the image to an internal disk and see if it works from there.
if so, you're just out of luck with this external USB option in this situation.

a better solution may be to use a 3rd party service for this.
Acronis True Image for example can boot and run from USB or DVD and can select backup images from anywhere connected.

Thank you for the reply. After additional research, and if I understood what I read correctly, it appears that the Restore From Image utility from advanced startup loads before the OS loads, so it doesn’t load any drivers with it, which is why I was being asked to load a driver before accessing the USB device where the Image is stored.

I did try moving the image to an internal disk, with the WindowsImageBackup folder in the root of the drive, and it was recognized and selectable.

I think you may be right, it’s probably best to use a third party utility. I was hoping to use Windows’ native image backup to do this but looks like it’s not ideal. Thanks for the advice.
 
I was hoping to use Windows’ native image backup to do this but looks like it’s not ideal. Thanks for the advice.
it would be nice if the integrated backup/restore platform had more options available.

a lot of the 3rd party software needs either a paid license or a yearly subscription fee though many of them will allow a trial version that can be used just with less options available.