System Image Restore Fails because of EFI/BIOS ?!

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dracos

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 8, 2005
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I hate Windows 8, let me get that out of the way. I decided to give it a try and it's on my HTPC at the moment.

Finally found the old Windows 7 backup program that was hidden in there and used it to create my backup and system image to a separate HDD. Win8 won't let me boot from that drive to access the image, so it makes me create a Repair Disc. I burned 8 different repair discs, different brands etc, and NONE of them will boot. Windows 8 says they were all created successfully, it lies apparently.

So I decided to see if I could just access the repair/restore options from the Win8 boot/install media and I could.

At that point I thought great, it works, but no... I get this error:

Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using EFI and this computer is using BIOS.

I don't understand what's going on as it's THE SAME COMPUTER! I installed Win8 to the computer, created the image with the computer but yet it says I can't restore the image to that computer.
I created the image on this computer and I'm trying restore the image to THE SAME COMPUTER that created the image but it says I can't, I've been at this for at least 4 hours now trying to figure it out and I'm at the end of my patience...

All of my other computers run Win7, and they will all stay that way for a long time to come, but I want my HTPC to work and it won't...

Anyone help?
 
dracos said:
I hate Windows 8, let me get that out of the way. I decided to give it a try and it's on my HTPC at the moment.

Finally found the old Windows 7 backup program that was hidden in there and used it to create my backup and system image to a separate HDD. Win8 won't let me boot from that drive to access the image, so it makes me create a Repair Disc. I burned 8 different repair discs, different brands etc, and NONE of them will boot. Windows 8 says they were all created successfully, it lies apparently.
Click to expand...

Did you install Windows in EFI mode?
 
How about you try booting from your Windows 8 DVD? IIRC, the Windows disk can also initiate a recovery from a back up.

EDIT: You already mentioned that. The Windows 8 back up process has failed for me when backing up to Blu ray. Ok when backing up to DVD. It's now deprecated in Windows 8 and I doubt MS is going to issue more fixes.
 
Last edited:
KENNYB said:
How about you try booting from your Windows 8 DVD? IIRC, the Windows disk can also initiate a recovery from a back up.
Click to expand...

umm...

"So I decided to see if I could just access the repair/restore options from the Win8 boot/install media and I could."


...tried that...
 
dracos said:
Guess you didn't figure out the problem then?
Click to expand...

Nope, I did the upgrade from a USB flash drive when I installed win8. I messed up the boot EFI partition messing with something and wanted to restore just the EFI partition from my system image I made on my home server backup drive. Booted from USB in UEFI mode to get to the restore settings and it kept giving me that error.

Restored my WIN7/Ubuntu image instead.
 
Some boards make you choose between BIOS or EFI mode, others give you two boot options per device (BIOS or EFI ROM, BIOS or DFI USB, etc). You may not of changed anything, but still selected EFI.
 
Finally! Thanks guys. apparently my recovery disk was booted into using uefi. I restarted, pressed F8 and selected my Usb recovery disk - it shows up twice: one for UEFI and one that's regular. When I was able to load it under bios, it finally let me restore the system image!
 
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