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Can a backup be recovered to a partition rather than a full disk?

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Is it possible to restore a backup to a partition as opposed to a disk?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

 

Michael

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Michael, in simple terms, the answer to your question is yes ...  but you can only restore a partition backup to a partition.

Steve Smith wrote:

Michael, in simple terms, the answer to your question is ytes ...  but you can only restore a partition backup to a partition.

Thanks, Steve.  I was trying to recover Windows 10 to create a dual boot in a Windows 11 machine.  I now have W10 on a separate partition (to W11) but it doesn't give an option to boot to W10.  I don't know how to recover the boot portion of my W10 backup to the W11 machine so I will achieve the dual boot.  But, perhaps this is a question for another forum.

Kind regards,

Michael

Michael, you would need to modify the Windows 11 BCD (Boot Configuration Data) to add an entry for your Win 10 partition.

Personally I stopped using dual-boot systems some years back when I got a more powerful main system with an Intel i7 CPU etc.  Instead I now run any other OS's as Hyper-V Virtual Machines and find that these are far more convenient than having to reboot into the second OS as can run from within Win 11.

The key to using Hyper-V is to use the correct Generation of VM, i.e. Gen 1 = Legacy / MBR and Gen 2 = UEFI / GPT (required if intending to upgrade a Win 10 OS to Win 11).  I have a mix of both types of virtual systems with Gen 2 being the majority.

Thanks again, Steve.  I haven't thought about using Hyper-V.  I'll look into it.  And thanks for the extra info on the correct generation.

Kind regards,

Michael

Take a look at webpage: Convert a Windows PC into a Virtual Machine using Hyper-V - for a good starter set of information.

See also webpage: How to Install Hyper-V on Windows 11 (2023) 

Note: officially you need the Pro version of Windows for Hyper-V but there is a method of enabling it on the Home editions too which is covered in the above webpage.

Thanks for the tutorials, Steve.  I'm going to give it a go right now.

Kind regards,

Michael