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Hi guys,
I'm taking a smaller 32GB hard drive with Windows 7, making a backup using the boot media. I upgrade the SSD to a new unpartitioned 1TB SSD. I restore the backup to the new SSD and reboot and reactivate Windows and extend the Windows partition to max size. No problems.

I upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 and I make another backup before I run Windows updates, and all is well. I make a few other backups of the Windows 10 install along the way and decide I want to go back to before I installed updates (testing deployment of Windows Updates). Windows is booting fine all this time. Once I restore using the Windows 10 image I made, the computer will not boot to Windows. It was booting fine at the same point before I backed up and restored.

I can restore using the Windows 7 image, and it boots just fine.

Can someone please tell me what the heck I'm missing? It's driving me crazy!

Quick outline:
1) Existing 32GB Win7
2) Image Drive
3) Install new unpartitioned 1TB
4) Restore Image from 2 and re-activate Win7 and extend partition
5) Upgrade Win7 to Win 10
6) Image Drive
7) Run Windows Updates
8) Return to Image made in step 6, no boot
9) Return to Image made in step 2, boots fine

Thanks!

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Coot, welcome to these public User Forums.

Assuming that you are using ATI 2017 here as per this forum?

How are you doing the restore each time?
Are you starting this from within Windows using the installed ATI application?
Or are you booting your computer from the ATI rescue media to do this?

If you are using the rescue media, then there should be no difference between restoring the two backup images providing that the rescue media boot mode matches how your OS boots, i.e. both using Legacy or both UEFI boot.

If you are doing this from Windows, then other factors can get involved that can cause issues, i.e. Windows 10 introduced Fast Start whereby it doesn't do a full shutdown but puts the computer into a hybrid sleep state.  If your recovery is done from this state....?

Personally, I only do any OS recovery from the rescue media, and after ensuring that the computer has been fully shutdown.

Steve,

Thanks for the response. Yes, I am using bootable ATI 2017 rescue media on a USB flash for backup and restore (sometimes I miss the days of Norton Ghost). When doing the backup I select my disk and the System Reserved and Windows partitions; sector-by-sector unchecked. Create a new archive and give it a name and location then proceed.

On recovery, I select my archive, recover whole disks and partitions, then here I've tried three different methods.

  1. Selecting the disk which selects the two partitions and MBR and Track 0 then selecting my disk and leaving recover disk signature unchecked and confirming the disk clean, then proceeding
  2. Selecting the disk which selects the two partitions and MBR and Track 0 then selecting my disk checking recover disk signature and confirming the disk clean, then proceeding
  3. Unselecting MBR and Track 0 and manually selecting which partition goes where.

Once I've upgraded to Windows 10, my partition is a 500MB System reserved (System, Active, Primary) and the rest my windows partition (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary). There is no EFI partition. If I do any method to make an image of a working Windows 10, the computer no longer boots after I recover it. If I follow the same method restoring back to Windows 7, it boots fine. My suspicion is it has to do with UEFI.

I could proceed and just have Windows 10 installed and working, but the problem comes in if the hard drive were to fail, then I'll be hosed when my backup doesn't work.

Thanks for confirming you are using the rescue media.

When you have upgraded to Windows 10, the system should remain using Legacy as it used for Windows 7 unless you are doing a clean install of Windows 10 and have a UEFI system?

I have recently done a lot of Win 7 to Win 10 upgrades for friends / family (with the demise of support for Win 7) and each one has been started from the Win 7 desktop and keeps the same partition scheme (MBR or GPT).

You can check by running the msinfo32 tool from Windows - in Win 7 this will show the OS drive for a Legacy systems, Win 10 shows Legacy, or else will show UEFI.

When using rescue media, this is capable of both types of boot mode, so you have to match that used by the OS you backed up to avoid migration to a scheme that may not boot.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

When doing the restore of your backup, this should be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level (to avoid having to set the config for each partition).

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

Steve,

Thank you. You are correct that ATI is booting in UEFI mode, and I need it to boot in Legacy mode. I am in the same boat as you with migrating to Windows 10 with Windows 7 reaching EOL.