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Have 8Gb stick(s). Trying to image/restore Surface Book using Rescue Media. Will either boot and not work, or not boot.

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I was trying to build rescue media to image a Surface Book that I need to send away. 

I use Acronis TI 2016 on a desktop where it's never worked all that well (mostly in terms of unpredictable overwriting behaviour of previous backups), but I thought I'd try to use the rescue media instead of Microsoft's own System Image which is kind of a pain to restore.

So far it's actually been a bigger pain doing it the Acronis way since nothing I've done to build the rescue media seems to work on the Book.

Creating it with the Acronis Bootable Media does actually start Acronis, but I have no mouse or keyboard input once I'm in Acronis. Creating it with the WinPE way, it doesn't boot at all.

Since I tried this I've attempted to also burn a CD image to try and image / restore another Windows 10 laptop with an optical drive - and this works fine. I also tried booting both regular and WinPE on this machine - and while WinPE didn't work, the Acronis media did.

Do I have to upgrade to 2017 (or buy a USB optical drive?) to get it to work with the Book if I want to use Acronis?

 

 

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HS, welcome to these user forums.

From the various posts I have seen in these forums regarding MS Surface systems I would suggest that you need to create and use the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media, but you also need to inject additional drivers for the Intel IRST components used on these machines.

Please see post: 127281: MVP Tool - CUSTOM ATI WINPE BUILDER for a way to build enhanced Windows PE Rescue Media for ATIH 2016 and 2017 using the Windows 10 ADK where it will inject the IRST device drivers automatically for you if you choose this option and should work fine on your MS Surface Book system.

Note: You should have one of the latest builds for ATIH 2016 - #6571 or #6581 installed.

Thanks for the reply.

 

Seems like a lot of work. If I upgrade to 2017 will everything work?

 

Unfortunately, probably not without taking the extra steps in creating the WinPE Rescue Media with the extra device drivers.  ATIH 2017 build 5554 is equivalent to 2016 build 6581 in this respect.

Yes and no...

Default rescue media may work, it did with the SP3, but I have not tested with an SP4 so am not 100% sure.  If it does, here are the limitations/caveats.  

1) Keep in mind the default rescue media is Linux based.  The SP4 is completely Windows based, proprietary to Microsoft and only works with Windows 10 drivers (you can install Win 8.1 on it, but almost nothing works).

If it does work, you will not be able to use touchscreen or the surface keyboard (specific Windows 10 drivers only).  You will need to disable secure boot in the bios.  You will need to use a USB hub to connect a minimum of 3 items (USB mouse, USB keyboard, USB flash drive with rescue media and possibly a USB to ethernet adapter if you need network acces for your remote backup location)

2) The big change in the SP4 from the SP3 is that Microsoft moved from a regular SSD hard drive to an NVME PCIE based hard drive.  In other computers, you can change the SATA mode from RAID to ACHI or AHCI to RAID.  NVME drives usually come in RAID by default (even with only one drive).  This is a problem for Linux recovery media since it needs third party RAID controller drivers not found in Linux media (often time this is also the case for WinPE rescue media as well, but we can add our own drivers to WinPE).  

I don't know if the SP4 let's you change from RAID to AHCI or not.  If it does, then you can use the Linux recovery media by going into the bios before a backup or restore, changing the SATA mode to AHCI then do your backup or recovery.  After the backup or recovery, switch back to RAID in the bios before you boot the OS again or you'll likely get a BSOD.

Ultimately WinPE rescue media will make life easier.  Download the Windows ADK, install it, and build your rescue media with Acronis - that should pretty much be it.  If you do need the additional RAID drivers, use our MVP winPE creator and it will add those for you automatically as well.  I don't think they're needed for the SP4 since Windows 10 probably has all of the drivers for the SP4 by default, but am not sure.