Is there really no way to restore an x86 image over an x64 install?

Could be the firmware doesn't support it. Seems to be mobile devices that do.

cereberus said:

I strongly suspect your issue is because drive is UEFI gpt formatted as it is 64 bit, and you cannot restore a 32bit image to a UEFI drive without converting it to mbr legacy bios drive.

You would have to wipe drive first and convert drive to mbr first.

cereberus said:

I strongly suspect your issue is because drive is UEFI gpt formatted as it is 64 bit, and you cannot restore a 32bit image to a UEFI drive without converting it to mbr legacy bios drive.

You would have to wipe drive first and convert drive to mbr first.

Would this also be the case if I were using Macrium Reflect, instead of Windows' built-in imaging tool? In other words, is there never a way to write an x86 Windows 10 image over an existing x64 Windows 10 installation, regardless of what tool is used?

If your current installation is one hard drive gpt style, you would need to change it to mbr for 32 bit to work.

(Assuming you firmware doesn't support 32 bit efi )

Would be the same with any imaging software.

cereberus said:

I strongly suspect your issue is because drive is UEFI gpt formatted as it is 64 bit, and you cannot restore a 32bit image to a UEFI drive without converting it to mbr legacy bios drive.

You would have to wipe drive first and convert drive to mbr first.

I've had success removing usable drives from 64-bit installations then using GPARTED [or Linux Mint with GPARTED in it] to wipe all partitions from the drives [make them like they came out of the factory] then installing Windows letting it choose whether MBR or UEFI according to what the BIOS was set up for.

It would also work with windows imaging in that case. Same with all imaging programs.

cereberus said:

If the 64bit version is mbr, it would work.

By the way, this computer has Legacy BIOS, not UEFI, and I read here that "Windows can only boot from GPT on UEFI-based computers running 64-bit versions of Windows 10" so I going to say that my x64 installation was MBR not GPT.

So I'm still not sure why Windows refused to let me restore my x86 image over my existing x64 installation. Either I'm doing something wrong, or Microsoft just chose to create its tool in a way that's unable to do this.

my x64 installation was MBR

If that is the case, then 32 bit winre should have been able to restore 32 bit windows image.

Either I'm doing something wrong

Seems like it.

SIW2 said:

Seems like it.

Right. So, if anyone here knows the proper way to accomplish this, I am hoping to be educated!

SIW2 said:

If that is the case, then 32 bit winre should have been able to restore 32 bit windows image.

32 bit Recovery USB refused to start; said it was incompatible with the x64 installation on the computer. So I guess this is the thing that I need to figure out; how do you get a 32-bit recovery environment running on a computer that has x64 installed?