Windows 10 System Image Recovery On Replacement Unit

Hi,

I had a Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10 Pro that started giving very poor battery performance and the case was getting very hot.

MS agreed to either repair/replace under warranty but I needed to ship it back.

Before I shipped it back I did a Windows 10 System Image Backup to a USB drive hopeing that if MS replaced with a new Surface pro 3 I would be able to restore the Image to the new unit.

MS has as I thought replaced the Surface Pro 3 with a new one but I am struggling to restore the image to this new one.

It is asking for a recovery Key ?

Am I right in thinking that you can restore the Image to a replacement unit ?

Many thanks for your help

No. The system image you have done on the old Surface Pro cannot be applied to another Surface Pro.

If you go to the folder that contains the system image backup, you will see that the folder has a name. That name is in reference to the machine it took the backup from.
Your new surface pro has a different computer name. Do a new system image with that new surface and you'll see it has a different name.

davidhk said:

No. The system image you have done on the old Surface Pro cannot be applied to another Surface Pro.

If you go to the folder that contains the system image backup, you will see that the folder has a name. That name is in reference to the machine it took the backup from.
Your new surface pro has a different computer name. Do a new system image with that new surface and you'll see it has a different name.

Oh dear.

Is there anyway round this or at least is there a way to at least resore the data i.e. docs, pics etc.

Many thanks for your help.

nicenswift said:

Oh dear.

Is there anyway round this or at least is there a way to at least resore the data i.e. docs, pics etc.

Many thanks for your help.

I am sure there is an easy way.
Thing is, I have my documents, pictures etc stored in an external hard drive. I never use the file backup method. So, I can help you there.
Sorry.

topgundcp said:

1. Open the folder that you have the backup and search for .vhdx files, take a note on the largest file size, that should be the image for the old C: Drive.
2. Next, open disk management, from the menu: Action->Attach vhd and navigate to where the vhdx file resides.
3. Next, Assign a letter for it then you can open with file explorer to restore your data.

Many thanks for this.

Would I be correct in thinking there is no way to do a full restore of the image to my new SP3.

topgundcp said:

For future backup. It is better to use Macrium Reflect Free which will create a single backup image.

Which you CAN restore to a new/replacement computer. My feeling is that I am making a backup in case the OS fails/gets corrupted, do I really want to trust that same OS to restore it?

Hi Guys,

Just thought I would follow up with this issue.

I had another go at restoring the image from the Broken SP3 to the new one.

I firstly created a recovery DVD from the new SP3.

I booted from this and selected restore from image and pointed to the image I had taken from the broken SP3.

I expected it to fail again but it went all the way to the end and then gave error The parameter is incorrect 0x80070057.

I rebooted the machine and to my joy it seemed to have worked.

the only problem I then faced was Windows 10 pro said it was not activated and when I tried to activate it failed.

I presumed this was because it was using the old bios key so I used produkey to find new one and put this in as the key and it activated fine.

Many thanks for all the help and advice I really appreciate your time spent on this.