Hello Can I get some advice plz: After a catastrophic accident, one of my Lenovo desktop's HDD went pfft I havent had to restore a Lenovo device before II have an utd image in Macrium can browse etc The lost disc was mbr/Legacy NTFS I have replaced the old HDD platter type with Legacy/MBR boot with a new SSD and UEFI and done clean windows install. Lenovo has an odd system where there is a "System_Drv" partition which afaict holds the boot loader. CAn I just restore the two partitions over the new drive? See Pics: Grateful for any advice Thx
Your SSD is built as a clean new System. This wasn't necessary... and it can be reproduced if necessary. Since your System hardware didn't change, you can (could have) just done a disk restore on your new SSD without any pre-formatting with your Macrium image.
"Your SSD is built as a clean new System. This wasn't necessary ..." Ya, OK. Thx: I was a little uncertain about how I wanted to proceed: do an all new install or just do the recovery. Not convinced now about a new install: there's a bucket load of old/new bits and pieces : will take days to get it set up. So I can just restore that Macrium Image straight onto the new SSD? No special partitioning or setups.? If I just load the "C" drive image and make that active: will it boot without the Lenovo System_Drive partition? LB
If the new SSD is a significantly larger size... if you want your resultant restore to be anything other than what the original System looks like, you'll need to do some partition placement during the restore. When the source image and target disk appear (make sure it's the right one if you have more than one disk in that system), easiest to use the "Erase Disk" function which will eliminate all the new build partitions when the actual restoration process starts. Then one by one you can drag the partitions from the image down on to your empty target, then use the LAYOUT option (which won't appear until you drag your first partition down on to the target disk) to resize them, if necessary, to utilize what you want on your new larger disk. If you don't do this and just complete the restoration, the disk geometry on your new SSD will most likely have a bunch of unused space... and you'll have to use some other partitioning tool to get everything the way you want it (but it should BOOT just fine). Your old image should contain all that is necessary to make the system BOOT properly as long as it was a complete disk image when it was made and not just a single partition image... no need to activate anything along the way. Just restore the image to an erased disk with any partitioning work along the way. Edit: see note below
You need to load both of those partitions from your Macrium image... the first is REQUIRED to be able to BOOT from the second, especially since you just erased the disk during the restore.
Another observation... your new build found your System as an UEFI BiOSed System and built it accordingly. The System must have your BiOS set to CSM... that's the setting that allows either an UEFI or Legacy/MBR system to be built. Since that BiOS setting hasn't changed since your issues, the restored Legacy/MBR configuration should work fine.
Thx Checked BIOS on new install: was set to UEFI only with CSM Disabled Have enabled CSM: Now setup is: Boot Mode: Auto Boot priority: Legacy First SO now I can go ahead and do restore from Image Anything special with partition geometry for the boot partition? Will the restore go to the first blocks of the new partition? The Macrium Image was made from same size disk as the new one: will the image "fill" the new disc or will I ( you did reference this ) need to resize any partitions? LB
In the New Disc and Install, the Primary boot sequence in BIOS is currently: SATA 1 -Windows Boot Manager SATA 2 USB Key etc etc Will the this Bios Boot sequence recognise the Restored image ?
Since the disks are the same size, all should go well without any partition resizing shenanigans... Just make sure you use that "Erase Disk" function in the the Macrium Recovery Media when you do the restore. The restore will start from the beginning of the erased disk when it proceeds.
Dude! Thx for the guidance.All gone well. Flipped the boot order around for the Macrium RE USB. Got the backup images off the NAS. Did the restore. Partitioning no issues.Nice clean boot on the new SSD with restored image. Booting like new. Macrium is a good tool. Never did this type of restore before: very smooth. As a bonus, have an image of a clean w10 install. Just need to clean out this restored system: over time it's accumulated a lot of trashy installs ( like me). I'm considering cloning all the platter discs in my/our desktops for new SSDs: all our home HW is a little decrepit (again, bit like me ) Reinforces the mantra: back up, back up and backup again. Kudos TRF. LB
