windows system restore without wiping entire hard drive?

Question

Level 1

7 points

windows system restore without wiping entire hard drive?

So I've had my hard drive replaced on my 27 inch iMac with apple's replacement programme - it's a 3TB fusion drive and it's still under warranty so thought it would be a good idea!

Before taking the computer for it's HD replacement I did a full time machine back-up and a system image for my windows 10 partition bootcamp (I did each of these on two separate hard drives).

Got computer back and firstly did a time machine restore. 8 hours later(!) the mac side of things was hunky dory.

Onto bootcamp. Downloaded a fresh USB windows 10 clean installation - all good.

Then problems.

So in windows 10 I went to system restore in the settings menu. Firstly this asked me for a CD restore disc, so I had to make one of those. Didn't take long. Repeat process and this time it allowed me to perform a system restore from my (windows external) hard drive. I had the option of excluding disks I didn't want to wipe so I selected the apple hard drive and the SSD (fusion) drive. The mac sees these as one thing, it seems as if windows sees them as separate. In doing so I got a dialogue box saying there were no hard drives to restore.

So back again. this time from booting from the windows restore CD I didn't uncheck the internal partitioned drive and the windows 10 system, after an hour or so, did indeed roll back to the point before I had my hard drive replaced. Rejoice!

Unfortuntely, this action also wiped my Mac OS system.

So, I slightly stuck. It looks as if I can get back my mac files, or my windows files, but not both.

In the end, it's the mac I use for the majority of my work so that was the top priority, but it has left me with a few quite important files I can't seem to retrieve despite doing the proper thing of backing up!

Any solution to this?

27inch imac

Posted on Sep 28, 2015 10:10 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Sep 29, 2015 2:15 AM in response to sunil vishin

Install a clean copy of W10 with a slightly larger size (add about 4GB) that the original System Image. Once W10 is up and running, restore from you backup image to this same partition. Windows thinks it is the only OS and want to use the entire disk. It has no concept of a Fusion drive either.

Reply

Answer 2

sunil vishin Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 29, 2015 2:16 AM in response to Loner T

Just to be clear - when I get the option of overwriting the drives the SSD/fusion is listed - should I make sure that I uncheck this one?

Many thanks for your help by the way!

Reply

Answer 3

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Sep 29, 2015 4:41 AM in response to sunil vishin

On a 3TB fusion drive, your Bootcamp should end up on the HDD on disk1s4, unless you manually do more esoteric partitioning. Check the output of diskutil list in OS X Terminal to be certain.

Reply

Answer 4

sunil vishin Author

Level 1

7 points

Oct 2, 2015 3:56 AM in response to Loner T

Nope, in the end none of this worked.

I gave the windows/bootcamp partition ample space (far more than my previous bootcamp partition), then when I went to restore it looked as if everything went well but no. Yes, the windows partition updated and I had all my files and system back etc. but the apple os drive was gone.

The problem seems to lie with the way that windows recovers an old system backup, so in windows 10 you go to settings, and do a system restore. This restarts the computer and it looks for a CD restore of windows (which I had made). Now you can have access to your external backup and you can elect the drive you want the backup to be placed on. HOWEVER windows doesn't see the partition, it just sees the C drive as your whole HD (funnily enough it sees the SSD part of the fusion drive as separate). Even if you ensure the SSD is unchecked, windows wipes the entire drive leaving the Mac OS unusable. Unless there is a way of recovering it via Terminal that I don't know about.

Running disk utility in recovery mode (with external bus pen drive) showed that the hard drive was split and highlighted in red. The only solution was to rebuild the fusion drive (again).

However, this time round I did the smart thing and made a backup of my windows files to an external hard drive.

Then I wiped the hard drive, reinstalled a fresh copy of OS X, partitioned the drive, installed a fresh copy of windows 10 - manually copied over my own files, then did a time machine restore of my Mac OS system. The time machine alone took 10 hours, so this is a process I'm glad I don't have to frequently repeat! Luckily I rarely use windows 10 - there are only a few programs that I use that aren't available on the Mac.

Reply

Answer 5

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Oct 2, 2015 4:56 AM in response to sunil vishin

sunil vishin wrote:

Nope, in the end none of this worked.

You are using System Recovery, not System Restore. It is unfortunate that M$ cannot come up with names that users understand and recognize. My test from 2 days ago works fine.

Reply

Answer 6

v4voodoo

Level 1

0 points

Feb 8, 2016 6:36 PM in response to Loner T

This doesn't really help someone who's already used System Recovery to create a backup and is trying to restore from that. Unless they can go back in time and use System Restore instead...

I haven't found a way to make it work with System Recovery yet; ran through the same problems as the OP.

Reply

Answer 7

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Feb 9, 2016 2:27 PM in response to v4voodoo

System Recovery assumes it has the entire disk. You can restore it using a two-step. Restore to an external blank disk and then use Winclone or CampTune.

Reply