Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

I'm using this to help a friend with their computer. They have a Toshiba Canvio Portable Hard Drive with this NTI EZ Backup software on it. It automatically runs backup jobs and in the event you have a hard drive failure, you are supposed to be able to drop a new hard drive in, boot to this external and it's supposed to put everything back.

Well, not so much.

http://www.nticorp.com/en/us/product/nt ... w-ez-3.asp

I've tried this 3 different times now, a couple of different ways. I've checked, and it's laying down all the proper partitions that were on the original drive. There is an OEM, Restore, and Windows partition. It's Windows 10 now.

Once it's finished all I get is a black screen and a flashing line. I've tried changing it UEFI boot but that doesn't work either. I tried to use AOEMI partition software to clone the original drive and it does fine with the OEM and Restore partitions but the Windows partition it cannot deal with.

I've tried using my Windows 10 boot USB and Startup Repair and that does not work either.

I went through these steps:

bootrec /rebuildbcd

Which didn't find Windows installations so I:

bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup
attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /rebuildbcd

Which then found my Windows and did the rebuild, but, it still would not start......

Now, I'm lost. The only other alternative would be this backup didn't work.

Thanks in advance

I rarely recommend doing image restores as they will restore problems with Windows, applications and drivers when in most cases the OS and software should be reloaded from scratch and only the data restored. I would contact the backup software company for support, however barring anything they can do at this point I would consider the image restore a failure and use it instead to mine the files and folders containing the actual user data. By that I mean I would reload Windows to a clean single partition, install drivers and applications and then restore any data (folders and files) from the backup as desired. In the future I would never rely on a single backup and would recommend at least two or more backups done to different drives on an alternating basis. Let me know how things work out, Scott.

Thanks Scott.

That's what I am thinking.

I'm working with a user that was just trusting this was backing up everything for him automatically.

There were no real problems here other than a failed boot and failed Dell Diagnostics with a failure code that comes back as a hard drive failure.

For now, a clean Windows install is what we have to work with.

Thanks!