Solved The system image restore failed with error 0x80042412, Windows 11

Hello, I am using Backup and Restore (Windows 7) to migrate my HDD OS drive to a NVME drive. The old HDD is a 1TB drive with two partitions of approx 500GB and the new drive is 4TB. A 2TB drive is used to store the backed up system image. The old HDD has been disconnected, for the purpose of forcing a system image restore upon boot.

I thought I could just create a system image and then use recovery options to reinstall the image to a new drive - but this does not work.
I am aware that the Backup and Restore service is being depreciated, but I still can access it from control panel - so, it should work?
I am sure this is what I have done in the past, what am I doing wrong now?
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The disks and partitions can be seen in Diskpart:




And the target drive can be seen in the 'exclude disks' section of Restore Options of the Recovery Drive, which is stored on a 16GB USB flash drive:



Whether the 4TB NVME drive is pre-formatted or not, it still produces the same error:



There is nothing else connected to the computer other than keyboard, mouse and monitor.

What did you smoke?
1. The old HDD is a 2 TB disk and not a 1 TB disk!
2. disk 0 is a MBR disk
3. What happened to your Boot partition on disk 0
4. 16 GB for a recovery ?
5. The NVME (GPT) has been initialized!

If you clean the target disk using diskpart/initialize to mbr it should go ahead and will be the same partition style as the image.

If you wanted to do the migration using image and restore one way is to convert the source to gpt before making the image. Another way is to restore the image and then convert the restored disk to gpt. If it is just two 500gb primaries it is expected that mbr2gpt.exe will be able do the conversion after restore.

@iko22


Do not use Backup and Restore (Windows 7), Microsoft is deprecating it.
Even MS recommends using 3rd party backup software.

System Image Backup (SIB) Solution

This feature is also known as the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) legacy control panel. For full-disk backup solutions, look for a third-party product from another software vendor. You can also use OneDrive to sync data files with Microsoft 365.

Click to expand...

With 3rd party backup software, you CAN take an image and restore it to anywhere you want.
I've done this... many times.


I'm not sure this is necessary, but I've always done it this way...
Make sure the Disk you're restoring to, matches the Disk type of the image.
Restore an MBR image to an MBR disk. Restore a GPT image to a GPT disk.

POLYSIUS said:

What did you smoke?
1. The old HDD is a 2 TB disk and not a 1 TB disk!
2. disk 0 is a MBR disk
3. What happened to your Boot partition on disk 0
4. 16 GB for a recovery ?
5. The NVME (GPT) has been initialized!

Click to expand...

1 - 3: Sorry for misleading you. I forgot to say that the original HDD was disconnected from the system, when the pictures were taken. Here is the Diskpart List Disk results with the original HDD in place:



It actually is one partition, not two as I stated in the O.P. (O.P. now corrected) And it shows as GPT, once you are looking at the right picture. And then the Partitions are correctly listed for a system drive.

The disk you are referring to is actually the disk containing the backed up system image.

4. It was a spare disk. I shall reformat it and reuse when done.

5. That is strange. I formatted the drive and the restore failed, so I deleted the drive formatting and it is now "unallocated" and no longer shows up in File Explorer. I tried again, and the restore still fails, and it still flags up as a GPT although it is no longer formatted. What could possibly be happening?

SIW2 said:

If you clean the target disk using diskpart/initialize to mbr it should go ahead and will be the same partition style as the image.

If you wanted to do the migration using image and restore one way is to convert the source to gpt before making the image. Another way is to restore the image and then convert the restored disk to gpt. If it is just two 500gb primaries it is expected that mbr2gpt.exe will be able do the conversion after restore.

Click to expand...

Sorry I got some details wrong in the O.P. Please read post #5. Thank you.

Go for a 3rd party Backup & Recovery tool!
A MSR-Partition (16 MB) as 1st partition can cause serious problems when running a recovery. Beside that BIOS updates can fail with the error message: ESP not found.
In post #1 you ran from PE-Mode. There you can select the disk and in diskpart you type
sel disk #
clean
convert gpt
create partition EFI size=260
format quick fs=fat32 label="System"
assign letter="S"
exit

According MS: Never initalize a OS disk from Windows!
You can't see a MSR-partition in diskmanagement
Convert disk 1 to gpt as well
MBR-disks don't have the MSR-partition.
A (C:)-partition that size (930 GB) is not a good idea.

What I would do is this:
in the above diskpart commands instead of exit
type
create partition msr size=16
create partition primary size=614400
format quick fs=ntfs label="Windows"
assign letter="W"
create partition primary size=1000
format quick fs=ntfs label="Recovery"
assign letter="R"
set id="de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac"
gpt attributes=0x8000000000000001
create partition primary
format quick fs=ntfs label="Data"
assign letter="E"
list volume
exit
reboot

Run a backup of your current C-Disk.
When ready immediately run a recovery to W:
target your new NVMe-disk
wenn ready type cmd (admin)
bcdboot W:\Windows
reboot and check if your NVMe is working ok.
The rest can be done later

Change drive letters according your situation
hint: copy the diskpart commands to notepad and save as partition.txt.
When in PE-Mode navigate to the file and use copy & paste!

So many years this has been depreciating. Even if they do, that won’t stop bootong into a system recovery and restoring it, at least not until Windows Twelve would be my uneducated guess

iko22 said:

1 - 3: Sorry for misleading you. I forgot to say that the original HDD was disconnected from the system, when the pictures were taken. Here is the Diskpart List Disk results with the original HDD in place:

5. That is strange. I formatted the drive and the restore failed, so I deleted the drive formatting and it is now "unallocated" and no longer shows up in File Explorer. I tried again, and the restore still fails, and it still flags up as a GPT although it is no longer formatted. What could possibly be happening?

View attachment 79510

Click to expand...

The disk is intialized to a partition style. For a disk to be any use, partitions would have to be created and then formattted with a filesystem.

Formatting partition(s) does not change the partition style of the disk.

Deleting existing partition(s) does not change the partition style of the disk.

Unallocated space is not inside a partition.

There must be something about the disk that bmrui doesn't like.

At this point I suggest returning the new disk to uninitialized by using diskpart clean command. Then try running the bare metal restore

POLYSIUS said:

In post #1 you ran from PE-Mode. There you can select the disk and in diskpart you type
sel disk #
clean

Click to expand...

SIW2 said:

There must be something about the disk that bmrui doesn't like.

At this point I suggest returning the new disk to uninitialized by using diskpart clean command. Then try running the bare metal restore

Click to expand...

Success! I did DISKPART SELECT, followed by CLEAN, and it worked. I didn't bother with manually setting up partitions, I just let the restore process take care of the details. Took about half an hour. It created a 1TB system drive, which I was then able to shrink from within Windows.

Probably there was something not right about the way disk had been initialized previously.

I have come across several situations when diskmgmt and diskpart didnt pick up anomalies.