Restore Windows 10 from a Windows 11 "upgrade"?
Just got Windows 11 offered for my laptop and will probably get the same on my 2 desktop machines.
If I simply don't like Windows 11, is it a save bet that I can restore Windows 10 from the last backup?
I do full disk backups, so everything is there. I'm running build 39703
Thanks.
I was pretty sure that would be the case, and in a simpler world I wouldn't have asked that question, bits being bits after all.
Nope. See attached
No go.
Tried a simple recovery as you mentioned (several times) and the process pretty much crashed, with a couple of error messages in small print which vanished too quickly for me to make note.
Then tried using the "Rescue Media Builder." On rebooting to absorb the contents of the USB device, I consistently got corrupted images of what would probably the display of the process if it was actually going to work. I was hopeful that it was just a cosmetic problem, but after waiting for something to happen for some time, I realized it wasn't going to do anything. I tried that a few times using different USB devices, but other than seeing changes in the corrupted images, nothing good happened.
The only option remaining is "Universal Restore," but that's going to take some research.
Anybody hanging out here with some advice?
This is not good news. I have never experienced anything like what you are reporting.
Bert, universal restore will not fix the problem. Not what it is designed to do. It is designed to deal with missing drivers that are not included in the normal recovery media.
Am I correct in my understanding that the issues you are reporting are with the recovery media, and that you had not got as far as selecting the backup to be recovered?
Am I correct in understanding that you can still boot into Windows 11; if so it may be that the Acronis installation has become corrupted in some way, in which case have you tried doing a repair installation? See here for instructions - not sure why the document does not refer to Cyber Protect Home Office; probably will be updated eventually.
Hopefully Steve Smith will have sage advice that covers what you are seeing.
Ian
Bert, more questions at this point than answers!
How long ago is it since you upgraded from Windows 10 to 11?
If it is less than 10 days, then you should be able to roll back the upgrade via the Recovery panel in Windows 11 (assuming that the Windows.old folder has not been removed...).
How are you attempting to perform the Acronis recovery here?
Are you booting from rescue media or attempting to start this from within Windows?
It is best to always use rescue media, booted in UEFI BIOS boot mode, for recovery of the OS.
I am making further assumptions here that Windows 11 is working / booting successfully, and that any rescue media is created on the same PC being recovered using the same version of ACPHO.
First: I'm back on the air with Win 10.
I had simply assumed that the rollback of Windows 11 was only a feature of the trial versions and not available in the release. I found out earlier this morning that the rollback to Win 10 was still an option for me and I used it. Windows 10 now boots and displays correctly. There is a little mention in the process that some drivers and other bits might not come back, so that's something I need to look into.
I'm still tempted to try a restore of the now-running Win 10 just to make sure the software is in the state it was before I "upgraded" to Win 11. I am very leery however, because if it fails in a way which corrupts the system so that it no longer boots, I'll be stuck starting from scratch using Dell's system restore.
Now to answer the questions:
I initially tried to recover from within Windows as I believe Ian suggested. That process rebooted (which makes sense) but then crashed with the error messages disappearing too quickly for me to record.
Then I used the rescue media. I tried a number of times, but in each attempt the screen display after booting was scrambled. The cursor responded to the mouse movement, but there was no other kind of response. I went through my stock of USB sticks and both USB ports in my attempts just in case it was simply a problem with the storage of the data, but saw the same corrupt display each time.
After each failed attempt to get back to Windows 10, Windows 11 rebooted successfully. Toward the end of my attempts to get back to Win 10 I did a "repair" install of ACPHO and then a complete delete and re-install with no different results.
As to "Universal Restore" I looked at that as a last chance, thinking that maybe the lower levels of Win 11 (drivers, etc.) were different enough from Win 10 that the Win 11 ACPHO simply didn't know how to talk to Win 10. I never actually got to the point of trying it anyway.
That's about it. If I've left something out or confused things, I'd be happy to elaborate or try to clear things up.
Bert, if you attempt to recover from within Windows then Acronis will boot into a small restricted Linux environment which has a number of known limitations which can come into play!
Booting with the rescue media is preferred over Linux as if built on the same PC will pick up device drivers from the Windows Recovery Environment.
Given you were able to upgrade to Windows 11, you have a UEFI BIOS boot system, presumably with TPM 2.0 enabled if not bypassing any of the requirements for Win 11, so the rescue media needs to be booted in UEFI boot mode too to give a successful recovery.
If your backups were created with ACPHO then you should only be using rescue media created by the same though the ATI 2021 media should work with the .tibx files from ACPHO (not tested by Acronis or myself). Acronis offer some guarantees of backwards compatibility with ACPHO & ATI versions but don't say the same for forwards direction!
The scrambled screen display when booted from rescue media would suggest a device driver issue for your display being used. There has been mention in the forum (see topic / update here) of changes Acronis have made with build 39703 for display device drivers! You could try the work-around suggested by Mustang in that post.
Universal Restore should not be needed / used for restoring a backup back to the same PC as it came from. It is intended to help prepare a restored OS to boot on a PC with different hardware than the original source PC which is not the case here for you.
Before considering doing a restore of Windows 10 - open the Control Panel > Device Manager and check if there are any devices shown with marks to suggest no driver is available etc.
Steve,
I've become far more familiar with the various recovery tools than I ever wanted to be. I'm in the process of downloading the ADK and will create rescue media just to see what the process is like, but I won't be using it and certainly hope I won't need that any time soon.
As to your other comments and suggestions, they match what I stumbled into pretty well. As I said, I hope to not need them.
I do see that TIBX mounting is not supported. I was hoping to be able to compare a list of the current content of the PC with that of my last full backup. So far everything is working properly, but it's too early to declare victory.
Steve,
Going the ADK route as described in the forum message you showed seems to work.
I got the expected displays and was able to select and change pages in them.
I did not go all the way to performing the recovery to re-load the backup I did before trying out Windows 11, but I'm thinking about it.
Glad you are making good progress Bert - I would just recommend making another new backup before deciding to reload the older one or not. Never will hurt to have too many backups rather than too few!
Steve,
I've been doing backups nightly, but made note of the full backup that was the last before things went strange.
I went a little farther with the rescue media than I planed, figuring I can always stop the process.
What I found is another problem. When going through the process to do a full disk recovery, everything looks OK until I get almost to the end: "Select Destination of Disk 1".
Instead of showing me the disk that's resident on the PC, it only shows Disk 1, the TIBX file that I'm using for recovery. It's in an external USB-connected hard drive. Nothing else is displayed as an option.
Before getting to this state, I can browse and see the drive and all its parts, so it's not invisible or disconnected.
Bert, the normal reason why any disks are not shown as potential destinations for recovery is if they are deemed to be of insufficient size.
Can you make a new disk backup then repeat the exercise to see if that would allow the correct disk 0 target to be available for selection?
It may also be worth running CHKDSK on the source disk before the backup to ensure that there are no file system issues at work here such as the free space map being corrupted that can cause the disk to look larger than it is?
The C: drive in the PC is a 512GB SSD (458GB nominal) with 114 GB used, 343 GB remaining.
The backup drive is a 1TB conventional HD (931 GB nominal) with 202 GB used and 729 GB remaining.
CHKDSK results on both are clean.
I've done a few backups since I rolled back Win 11 and I've selected each at some time during my testing, with the same results.
One odd thing I noticed when poking around the restore and backup sections of the program, only the disk that contains the rescue media and the disk that contains the backups are ever shown as available to be used in either backup or restore functions.
When the program is in a mode where I can browse around, the C: drive does appear but doesn't seem to have much in it.
Bert, may be a silly question but are you sure that you are actually seeing the real C: drive and not another drive being given the drive C: letter?
It's the real C: drive. It shows up as X: in the program, if I recall correctly.
I'm coming to a conclusion that the rollback of Win 11 to Win 10 left something nasty behind.
I'm seriously considering using the Dell system recovery tool and just reinstall the software I use.
Bert, sorry but the X: drive in the rescue media is a virtual drive and not your real C: drive - this is the default drive letter used by WinPE.
If that's the case than the "real C:" drive doesn't appear at all.
My plan to use the Dell recovery tool is sounding better and better.
Bert, what actual type of drive / SSD is your C: drive?
Do you have BitLocker enabled for it?
There are various reasons why it might not be shown!
Steve,
Maybe Bert should have a look at GPT attributes?
Enchantech wrote:Steve,
Maybe Bert should have a look at GPT attributes?
Bert, to expand on the comment from Bob above, Windows 11 looks to have introduced some changes to how disks are displayed when using WinPE media, though this was being found only after a clean install of Windows 11 from my own experience, not from an upgrade from 10.
To check this, you need to use Diskpart commands to check the GPT attributes for the OS C: partition, normally shown as Disk 0 Partition 3.
DISKPART> select disk 0 DISKPART> select partition 3 DISKPART> detail partition
Partition 3 Type : ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7 Hidden : No Required: No Attrib : 0X8000000000000000 Offset in Bytes: 122683392 Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info ---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- -------- * Volume 1 C Windows11-2 NTFS Partition 99 GB Healthy Boot
If you see the 0x8000... attribute (as above) then the disk will not be accessible until that attribute is either changed or a drive letter is assigned to it via the WinPE Command prompt using:
I don't know if this is relevant to your specific scenario here but one to ponder!
I should have checked in earlier.
I pulled the pin a few hours ago and turned things over to Dell Recovery.
I'm now (apparently) running a clean copy of Windows 10, with all my important tools up and running. I'll fill in the toys later.
Funny that I originally had the same reaction to Windows 10 when it first appeared as I did with Windows 11, except that I wasn't tempted to dive into Win 10 as quickly.
Win 10 grew up, and buried under the pinball machine display was a usable system. Hoping to see the same with Win 11, if I live so long.
[Hoping that Google cleans up Android 12 too.]
Thanks for tolerating me and my problems these past few days. I'll try not to do that again.
Addendum:
With a clean Windows 10, I thought I'd try the recovery techniques to see how they're supposed to work.
First, using the "Recovery" method direct from the Acronis software, it failed with "Error 0x1480008: Cannot get file "/acroldr/kernel64.dat from the partition with GUID 2EA891E2-5AE1-4C19-B51C-3D21869E4A4D." (Full image of the error is included.)
[Breaking into two messages, since i can't seem to get more than one image in a message]
Addendum:
I then tried the "Rescue Media" which started out looking promising, but in the end didn't offer the PC's drive as a destination. (Again, images of the process are included).
This is very troubling.
[Well, forget about the images, since I can't seem to add any to this message]
Thanks for the information.
Since you do full disk backups, you've got a safety net. Just follow these steps: Take a deep breath, and don't panic! Before you upgrade to Windows 11, make sure to create a system image backup of your Windows 10 setup. It's always better to be safe than sorry! If you decide to try out Windows 11 and later want to revert to Windows 10, simply boot from your backup media. Choose the "Restore from System Image" option, and select your Windows 10 backup. Let the magic happen, and you'll be back to familiar territory.