Help needed to recover a windows image.

Pader said:

I used diskpart to try to alter the firmware ...

This statement makes no sense. Diskpart does not alter firmware nor should you try to do that.

The good news is: Since you have a working system image backup, you will almost certainly be able to restore it.

Let's start with checking how you boot up your Windows 10 installation DVD (BIOS or UEFI): When you boot from DVD and start installing Windows, in the selection of the destination for the Windows installation, will it say something along the lines 'cannot install on this disk' when you

• point setup to a GPT formatted disk? or
• point setup to a MBR formatted disk?

Also helpful would be info about:
When Windows was running fine and you made the system image backup, can you perhaps recall:

• Was Windows installed on a GPT disk or a MBR disk?
• Was everything important to the system image located on the same disk (System partition, Microsoft Reserved (MSR) partition, Windows partition, etc.) or was the configuration spanning across multiple physical hard drives, like bootloader on one disk and Windows volume on a different disk?
• Does the system image backup include (or exclude) volumes that are optional, like a data volume and if so, were these volumes on the same, or different physical disks?

Also, from the top of my head, changing the disk layout in diskpart is somehwat like this
select disk <disk number>
clean (mind, this will erase everything on the disk)
convert mbr or convert gpt (whichever you need)

Finally, converting/restoring a BIOS/MBR installation to UEFI/GPT is possible too. If you wish to do so just ask :)

Thank you for replying.
I could not wait any longer without this computer and so I did install a clean copy of Windows 10 and though not sure what I actually did, I used a trial copy of Acronis and managed to transfer the Windows system image to the newly setup C Drive.

This had the effect of transferring all of my files and desktop icons across. I did have to reinstall many of my apps but at least I had a good prompt from the desktop icons of what I needed to do.

Some of the original apps will not be reinstalled as I have downloaded alternatives.All I need now is a good cleanup programme to clear all of the rubbish left over.

Now that I have the computer working reasonably well, I shall not use it for Insider downloads and leave that to my other computer.

I have also done a full system backup on another drive using Macrium Reflect which I am more used to than Acronis.

I would like to do a second backup to another network computer, but this has highlighted another problem in that this computer will not allow me to set up a workgroup. It seems that it is a common problem and I cannot rectify it in services.msc