Imaging Dell Optiplex 3070

Jumblebumble

Back story
I have been imaging Dell OptiPlex's for years using sysprep and Macrium reflect to create an image
I have always used Legacy boot as UEFI is a pain
Unfortunately in the latest Dell OptiPlex 3070 the option of booting in Legacy has been discontinued leaving only UEFI boot
The PC has a mSATA

2HMFM INFO,C DRIVE,PCIESSD 1

759G2 SSDR,256G,P32,30S3,HYNIX,BC501

So I boot off a USB and successfully imaged the whole HDD to a  MRIMG Macrium File 
I then rebooted the PC and Booted off the same Macrium recovery USB and restored the image to the HDD
The HDD now refuses to boot claiming it cannot find windows
I have tried disabling secure boot
I have tried restoring only the C drive partition leaving the 2 recovery and system partitions alone
Nothing has worked and I am left with an irreparable and unbootable system if macrium restored
A windows 10 install usb created with rufus works fine
Does anyone here  have any idea how to do this simple task ?

[Deleted User]

I'm confused by your error message claiming it "cannot find Windows" because the UEFI firmware has no idea what OS might be installed on your hard drive (eg could be Linux) so how does it know the OS is Windows if it can't find it? An exact error message is useful when trying to diagnose problems like this.

A few things to check:

1. You definitely did a whole disk clone and restored as a whole disk clone? The hidden partitions are essential for UEFI - the EFI partition is the one containing the boot loader and must be present. Just restoring C: partition will never work with UEFI.

2. Have you gone into the firmware setting to tell it where the bootloader is? Unlike legacy BIOS where you tell it a disk that you want to attempt to boot from and it just reads the first sector of the disk and away it goes, a UEFI bios stores the path to the bootloader in NVRAM. This is programmed when the OS is installed, it could be that the prior Windows installation on the machine you are cloning to doesn't match the cloned disk and you need to manually specify the bootloader in the EFI partition.

You can add entries in the screen as shown below - point it at the  \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi - you should remove all other entries that aren't working as well.


3. If it is a SATA disk, are the following setting the same on each machine - ie either AHCI or RAID? When Windows is installed it will load the drivers for one or the other, if the destination PC is set differently the cloned image will not boot.

Neil_Jones

If you built the machine in Legacy Mode, cloned it away, and a BIOS update has removed the Legacy option so it can only boot in UEFI mode, then that tells me your cloned image (of the Legacy Boot) is no longer valid.  Not uncommon for a BIOS in one state to not be able to boot from a configuration in another state particularly on more modern hardware.

I'd suggest rebuilding your Macron image, restoring it and seeing what happens.

Jumblebumble

Deleted_User said:

I'm confused by your error message claiming it "cannot find Windows" because the UEFI firmware has no idea what OS might be installed on your hard drive (eg could be Linux) so how does it know the OS is Windows if it can't find it? An exact error message is useful when trying to diagnose problems like this.

A few things to check:

1. You definitely did a whole disk clone and restored as a whole disk clone? The hidden partitions are essential for UEFI - the EFI partition is the one containing the boot loader and must be present. Just restoring C: partition will never work with UEFI.

2. Have you gone into the firmware setting to tell it where the bootloader is? Unlike legacy BIOS where you tell it a disk that you want to attempt to boot from and it just reads the first sector of the disk and away it goes, a UEFI bios stores the path to the bootloader in NVRAM. This is programmed when the OS is installed, it could be that the prior Windows installation on the machine you are cloning to doesn't match the cloned disk and you need to manually specify the bootloader in the EFI partition.

You can add entries in the screen as shown below - point it at the  \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi - you should remove all other entries that aren't working as well.


3. If it is a SATA disk, are the following setting the same on each machine - ie either AHCI or RAID? When Windows is installed it will load the drivers for one or the other, if the destination PC is set differently the cloned image will not boot.

This gets stranger and stranger
The latest Macrium added the UEFI PM991 into the Boot options without any action from me
The file points to \EFI\Boot\BootX64.efi
and the system boots fine 
The Windows Boot manager points to
\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BootX64.efi
and the PC goes into recovery mode
Anyway the issue is solved and I have a better understanding of what is going on and appreciate your help