OPBS — Open Pickle Backup System

kelper · 2026-11-01T03:02:11-0500

I have been testing 0.6.97. I successfully built two-partition rescue media on my 16GB UFD and on my 120GB USB SSD.
I booted into the PE on the USB SSD and started a backup. But it could not find the partition on my rescue media. Diskpart confirmed that the NTFS partition on the SSD was visible.

OPBS Recovery - back up this computer
================================================

Writes an image of a disk to another drive. Nothing on the source
disk is changed - use this to save a machine before reinstalling.

[1/3] What to back up
Disks:
0) 954 GB G932EQM 1T 0000_0000_0000_0000_0C82_D594_0003_5620.
1) 119 GB N520 SDAPNUW-128 0000000000000000

Source disk > 0
Partitions on disk 0:
0) 300 MB Unknown "Partition 0"
1) 16.0 MB Unknown "Partition 1"
2) 130 GB Unknown "Partition 2"
3) 1.1 GB Unknown "Partition 3"
4) 822 GB Unknown "Partition 4"

Back up [w] whole disk (recommended), [p] specific partitions, or (q) quit.
Mode > 0,1,2,3
Enter w or p.

Back up [w] whole disk (recommended), [p] specific partitions, or (q) quit.
Mode > p
Partitions > 0,1,2,3

[2/3] Where to write the image
[2026-11-01 07:34:48.931] [WARN] Drive enumeration failed: spawnSync powershell.exe ENOENT
No destination volume found (plug in a USB drive or another disk).

The wizard ended with code 1

bobeeire · 2026-11-01T06:07:49-0500

kelper said:
I have been testing 0.6.97. I successfully built two-partition rescue media on my 16GB UFD and on my 120GB USB SSD.
I booted into the PE on the USB SSD and started a backup. But it could not find the partition on my rescue media. Diskpart confirmed that the NTFS partition on the SSD was visible.

OPBS Recovery - back up this computer
================================================

Writes an image of a disk to another drive. Nothing on the source
disk is changed - use this to save a machine before reinstalling.

[1/3] What to back up
Disks:
0) 954 GB G932EQM 1T 0000_0000_0000_0000_0C82_D594_0003_5620.
1) 119 GB N520 SDAPNUW-128 0000000000000000

Source disk > 0
Partitions on disk 0:
0) 300 MB Unknown "Partition 0"
1) 16.0 MB Unknown "Partition 1"
2) 130 GB Unknown "Partition 2"
3) 1.1 GB Unknown "Partition 3"
4) 822 GB Unknown "Partition 4"

Back up [w] whole disk (recommended), [p] specific partitions, or (q) quit.
Mode > 0,1,2,3
Enter w or p.

Back up [w] whole disk (recommended), [p] specific partitions, or (q) quit.
Mode > p
Partitions > 0,1,2,3

[2/3] Where to write the image
[2026-11-01 07:34:48.931] [WARN] Drive enumeration failed: spawnSync powershell.exe ENOENT
No destination volume found (plug in a USB drive or another disk).

The wizard ended with code 1

That log line made this an instant diagnosis — thank you for including it:

[WARN] Drive enumeration failed: spawnSync powershell.exe ENOENT
The destination picker lists drives with PowerShell, and PowerShell does not exist in Windows PE. So the one step whose entire job is to find your USB drive found nothing — on the very media that was offering it. Diskpart was right and OPBS was wrong.

Fixing it turned up two more things in the same code:

The picker was reporting a drive's total size as its free space — so even when it worked, the number was wrong.
Mode > 0,1,2,3 — your instinct was right, and we bounced it with "Enter w or p." Typing the list directly now works, in both the backup and the restore wizard. (You shouldn't have to learn a menu to tell us what you already know.)
The picker now lists volumes using only what exists in the recovery environment — free space from the filesystem itself, labels from vol, which is part of the command prompt. All three are fixed and tested, and they'll be in the next build.

Also good to hear the two-partition media built cleanly on both the 16 GB stick and the 120 GB SSD — that layout was the point of the exercise.

kelper · 2026-11-01T09:24:01-0500

After selecting option 3 to run commands, can you provide an option to return to the menu, reboot or shut down?

I clicked on the cross, top-right and removed the usb to stop rebooting int the PE, but this causes Windows to go into repair mode. I can use winpeutil shutdown but that's hardly obvious.

bobeeire · 2026-11-01T12:32:24-0500

kelper said:
After selecting option 3 to run commands, can you provide an option to return to the menu, reboot or shut down?

I clicked on the cross, top-right and removed the usb to stop rebooting int the PE, but this causes Windows to go into repair mode. I can use winpeutil shutdown but that's hardly obvious.

Fair — it was a one-way door, and the way out shouldn't have been a command you had to already know.

The menu now looks like this:

What would you like to do?
[1] Restore this machine from a backup image
[2] Back up this machine (save an image before reinstalling)
[3] Command prompt (type exit to come back to this menu)
[4] Reboot
[5] Shut down
[q] Quit to a command prompt without the menu
exit in the command prompt brings you straight back to the menu — and so does every other action: a finished restore, a finished backup, a cancelled one. Reboot and Shut down use wpeutil on the media and fall back to shutdown.exe on normal Windows, so it works in both places.

Reboot also tells you to take the stick out first and waits for you to press Enter — otherwise it boots straight back into Windows PE, which is exactly the loop you were trying to break.

On the repair mode: closing the console ends Windows PE, the machine restarts, and with the stick out it falls through to the internal disk — a boot Windows didn't expect. Pulling the media mid-restart is never a clean exit. You shouldn't have had to work that out, and now you don't have to.

This will be in the next build.

kelper · 2026-11-02T04:05:50-0500

The logs don't say much. I think it would be better to capture all the output in the PowerShell window.

bobeeire · 2026-11-02T12:13:12-0500

kelper said:
The logs don't say much. I think it would be better to capture all the output in the PowerShell window.

You're right, and it was worse than it looked.

There is a real constraint behind it: an elevated process can't have its output redirected from outside — the parameter that launches a process elevated and the parameter that redirects its output are mutually exclusive in PowerShell, so the launch fails before it prompts. That forces each elevated step to record its own session. The media build does that. The recovery staging step did not — and its commands were also piping their output to nothing, so even a transcript would have been empty. All that ever existed was a window that closed.

So the fix has three parts:

now I have every elevated step write a full transcript, capturing what each command actually printed;
the tool output is no longer discarded — dism, bcdedit and manage-bde say what they did, and it lands in that transcript;
the transcript is copied into the app's log folder rather than left in a temp directory, on success as well as on failure.
And a failure no longer reports just "Recovery staging failed" — it carries the tail of that output and where the full transcript was saved, so there is something to act on instead of a verdict.

This will be in the next build.

kelper · 2026-11-02T12:26:12-0500

At the end of a successful backup, I get a message saying the restore was successful.

bobeeire · 2026-11-02T14:40:48-0500

kelper said:
At the end of a successful backup, I get a message saying the restore was successful.

View attachment 188644

That message is mine and it is badly placed — but it is not reporting on your backup.

It is the report from an earlier recovery restore. Those run outside Windows, so OPBS writes the result to disk and shows it the next time the app starts. That toast does not go away on its own, so it sits there through whatever you do next — including a long backup — and at the end of the backup it looks like the backup's own result. The message never said when the restore happened, which is the part I got wrong.

The notice is now titled "Earlier: recovery restore finished…" and leads with the time it ran, so it cannot be mistaken for the job you just finished. It also says plainly that it is a report from before this session.

One piece of good news in your screenshot: those two warnings are the reworded ones from 0.6.102 and they are showing exactly as intended — the forced-dismount line explaining that the restore waited and then took the volume normally, and the free-space clear telling you it is expected rather than damage. That part is working on real hardware.

OPBS — Open Pickle Backup System

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