In Windows entire system restore: recovery to the original location failed due to an error
We have a fairly new/powerful laptop that we needed to send in for a warranty replacement for a broken screen. So I turned off bitlocker(waited for decryption and rebooted), then ran a entire system backup to the external D: drive usb drive. The backup and validation completed perfectly. I then disconnected the external drive and ran a windows 10 built-in reset/erase to make sure we didn't send in the laptop with any personal info. When the laptop came back, I did another reset/erase/reload of windows. I notice that during these reloads of windows it clears the tpm.. sidenote... I then re-disabled bitlocker on the new windows install. I installed windows with a different local account username by the way. When bitlocker was fully unencryted, I re-installed acronis, connected the external drive, and in acronis i added the existing backup on the external drive to the view and clicked on recovery and left the defaults for entire system recovery. The recovery started and then asked for a reboot to continue.. I click yes.
During the reboot recovery this error pop's up:
We hit the red X
It then boots back to unchanged windows login, If I check the error in acronis on the recovery operation in the activity tab, it very vaguely says:
"recovery to the original location failed due to an error"
Why wouldn't this recovery work? I need to recover from in windows because I am remotely helping a friend with their laptop and recovering from a bootable acronis cd would be too hard to do remotely
I will also attach some error logs from mvp utility. I didn't copy everything from the logs, just some of what seemed relevant. But I still don't see a clear reason why recovery wouldn't work.
please help :)
Attachment | Size |
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errors.txt | 10.14 KB |


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So is there no way to get the in-windows restore to work with newer computers (and why doesn't acronis pop up a warning before attempting saying this probably won't work since we see you have raid drivers)? :) As far as the rescue media route, I must be doing something wrong because I have tried for hours in times past to get them to recognize the internal ssd's and they never do unless I change the drive type to ahci from raid in the bios. Would be curious if you have guide on how to easily create a rescue media that recognizes raid/nvme style ssd drives. Has anyone got these drives to be reliably recognized in the normal factory raid bios mode?
But back to this particular instance.. I am guiding someone thru these steps remotely so the bootable media is going to be too hard to guide thru... Is there a compromise way to restore from within the os? Maybe I change the bios to ahci? Maybe instead of doing full system I do partition only? Just trying to brain storm because walking someone thru the screens remotely with rescue media is very difficult.
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Is there a compromise way to restore from within the os? Maybe I change the bios to ahci? Maybe instead of doing full system I do partition only? Just trying to brain storm because walking someone thru the screens remotely with rescue media is very difficult.
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Joe, there isn't an compromise to restore Windows from within Windows simply because the restore process needs to wipe the target disk as part of the initial operation, hence why it is recommended to use bootable rescue media. The Linux method used when starting a recovery from within Windows loads fully into memory to produce the recovery Acronis environment. You could emulate this by adding a Windows Boot Configuration entry to boot from the rescue media .wim file stored on an internal drive, which would potentially have the required RAID and disk drivers but the actual recovery would still be a manual operation that a person in front of the computer would have to perform step by step.
I use that approach on some of my own systems if you want to give it a try, but it doesn't answer your need to have remote access to the system being restored.
See the video on my YouTube channel that shows how to add a .wim entry to the BCD. There is also a video there showing a disk recovery that may be of help in guiding the person at the remote end through the process.
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