Hi!, I have followed this wonderful tutorial, however! when I went to "restore" the computer after following the directions, it went through the installation process as if it was a fresh install of windows, (asking for a key, etc) is there a way of telling the installer the answers so that a "novice" can do this without requiring that information. as I am building this for another person who is not technically inclined to know these things. thanks
You could do that following the tut, in the link below, to create unattended install media but that would be on separate media such as USB stick, not a recovery partition on drive. But it would be as simple as the recovery partition for a non techie to rebuild their system.
Create media for automated unattended install of Windows 10
Kari's words from tut
When done we will create a custom USB flash drive install media for unattended install. To install Windows 10 using this USB will be totally unattended, "Hands Free"; simply boot from USB and forget it, take a break, come back to PC to find everything is done, Windows fully installed without a single key press or mouse click, without any user interaction.
Why would it try and do a new fresh installation? It's supposed to restore the exact state of the computer as it was, when the snapshot was taken.
How did you choose to 'restore' the computer? Was it though the menu shown in this picture?
https://www.tenforums.com/attachment...-boot-menu.jpg
I assume because jimbob is following this from the last para of the tut, but could be wrong:
Tip
If your system disk crashes and no boot menu is shown, you can do recovery from your custom recovery partition by booting from Windows install media and running Windows Setup manually from recovery partition.
For instance, if your recovery partition has drive letter F:, start Command Prompt with SHIFT + F10 when Windows Setup shows the region selection screen, then enter following command:
F:\Setup.exe
Windows Setup will be run from your custom recovery partition.
I think that you have completely misunderstood something.
Booting from your custom recovery partition, selecting it from boot menu, is exactly as a normal clean install of Windows 10. You will be asked to click Install button, and select on which partition you want to install Windows.
Only difference is, that whereas normal, default Windows installation will then ask about region and keyboard, which user account should be created, and so on, all this will be automated using data on your custom WIM file.
Short: restoring Windows 10 from custom recovery partition is exactly like normal clean install.
Kari
I didn't say it did a clean install, I said it went through the same steps as if a clean install, asking for which partition to use, the windows key, ect. I just want to skip all that and it knows which partition to install it to, and not ask any questions. I will follow the guidelines for the custom boot USB drive, and thanks for all your inputs. this will ultimately get me on the right track to get this done, thanks.
P.S. this is where I am at, I have installed windows 10 on this machine, updated and installed all the drivers and software, (in audit mode) no accounts have been made, what I want is when the image is applied all of this is set exactly as it is now. I believe the guide for automated unattended installation will do the trick. as the answer file makes the partitions and tells it which partition to restore the image to. thanks, everyone.
Last edited by djspctechsupport; 21 Jun 2019 at 22:22.
Hi all,
This is a great way to custom backup. I did create a recovery partition successfully.
Is there anyway to make the contents of created partition un delete-able?
reason was that I navigated into the recovery partition and deleted one of the folders by mistake, and hence could not perform a recovery.
So how can you make the "recovery parititon" be accessible to perform recovery but cannot be edited or deleted.
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance
Tony
It has been fun testing this out. I do have an issue on trying to do a recovery.
I am using Win10 1903, on a PC with a bios activation key.
When choosing recovery on boot, after hitting Install Now. I am at the fist screen which is Activate Windows.
If I choose "I don't have a product key" it says "Windows could not display the images available for installation."
So I rebooted and grabbed the bios key and wrote it down. Rebooted again and choose recovery. Enter Bios key and get "This product key didn't work, Please check it and try again."
Would I need to create an ei.cfg etc because this is an OEM install? Maybe just something new with 1903? Could just be that I created a bad wim file, just not sure where to start troubleshooting.
Thanks
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