A Macrium image question

I have an hdd (A) on the pc that has dual operating systems.

Tonight I imaged the partitions from one of the OS’s to an external hdd (B) that’s connected by usb.

Tomorrow I plan on opening up the pc and swapping A with B. So B will be the new internal hdd.

Will that work. I’ve never had to do a restore, and this is not exactly a restore.

Let's know how you go when you just simply try it.

Yes, that should work. Imaging a drive to another drive, then replaceing the original drive with the drive that you imaged to "should" work. But as idgat note, just try it!

Thinking that the image I created last night was compressed, I went ahead and re-imaged awhile ago with no compression, since the hdd will be used to boot Windows and not as storage for images. Don’t know if my thinking is right on this, but I’ll know in awhile. I’ll be back later with the results.

It didn’t find the OS because a required file is missing or contains errors.

file: windows/system32/winload.exe

status: 0xc000000e

There are two disks on this pc, an ssd with Windows 11 and this hdd with a Windows 10 image that now needs troubleshooting.

I don’t know why winload.exe is missing or contains errors, but ……

Dell Optiplex 960 CPU Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00

Click to expand...

Presumably that disk is mbr and you are using bios mode.

It is not impossible that winload.exe is damaged.

It is much more likely that the bcd store has a problem.

EITHER:

boot into win11
find the partition on the hd that is marked Active
open admin cmd prompt and type

bcdboot ?:\windows /s &:

replace ? with the windows partition letter on the hd and replace & above with the letter of the active partition letter on the hd

OR

you could boot some kind of winpe in bios mode and run bcdboot windowsdriveletter:\windows

e.g. bcdboot d:\windows

you would need to have a look and see what the windows drive letter is from winpe. because it might be different seen from there and not necessarily C

SIW2 said:

boot into win11
find the partition on the hd that is marked Active
open admin cmd prompt and type

bcdboot ?:\windows /s &:

replace ? with the windows partition letter on the hd and replace & above with the letter of the active partition letter on the hd

Click to expand...

Thanks for your help on this.


From the Windows 11 ssd,I see that the active partition on that had is G:

I’m in bcdboot but not sure what I should enter to try and fix the boot.

what is the letter of the windows partition on the HD ?
from admin cmd prompt

bcdboot windowspartitionletter:\windows /s g:

/s g: specifies adding the boot critical files and the bcd entry on the active partition G

if you also want to add an entry for the os on the HD to your current boot menu ( on the ssd )

bcdboot windowspartitionletter:\windows

G:

admin cmd prompt

bcdboot g:\windows /s g:

I dont think the optiplex 960 supports efi, so that will create the bios boot entries by default.

And Disk Management shows it as just one single partition G. It seems like Macrium did not create the separate partitions for that O S?

separate partitions for that O S?

Click to expand...

not necessary for bios boot, a single partition can be both system ( must be marked active ) and boot.

Failure when attempting to copy boot files.

did you use Administrator cmd prompt?

what is the os on the hd ?

At this point, I’m going to try and explore another solution….. at some point in time. But I really appreciate all the time and effort you put into this.

SIW2 said:

what is the os on the hd ?

Click to expand...

SSD has Win 11 and the hd only has what Macrium imaged to it…. Win 10

The image to the hd came from an internal hdd with Win 10.