Windows 8.1 Not Bootable After Restoring Or Copying With HDM 12

Scenario: you restore, copy, or migrate your Windows 8.1 system with HDM 12 or another generation 12 program, and the resulting system doesn’t boot

The final build of Windows 8.1 broke compatibility with generation 12 of our products. In particular, with operations that update the BCD store, which governs system boot. As a result, when a Windows 8.1 system is restored, copied, or migrated with HDM 12 or another generation 12 program, it doesn’t boot.

Full Windows 8.1 compatibility is included into newer Paragon programs such as HDM 14, alongside multiple other improvements. The best solution to this problem is to upgrade to a generation 14 product.

Alternatively, if you prefer to stick with version 12, you can consider the following workarounds. They all revolve around BCD. BCD is where Windows stores boot records. We update it on operations that change the order of partitions, which includes restoring or cloning system or boot partitions. This update fails to add Windows 8.1 because the system is not being properly detected. The solutions are the following.

For system restore

After restoring the system to the same drive, to make it bootable, you need to rewrite the current BCD file on the newly restored system with the old BCD file still contained in the backup you’ve restored from. This needs to be done from a Linux-based Paragon recovery media that you can create from within the Hard Disk Manager. Unfortunately you can’t use a WinPE-based recovery media for this. For the following operations, you’ll need another Windows on the same computer, or another PC with your Paragon program installed on it.

To create a Linux-based recovery media, launch the program, open Tools > Burn Recovery Media (in express mode) or Recovery Media Builder (in advanced mode). The wizard will guide you through the steps to create a bootable USB flash drive or CD / DVD.

After creating the media, connect it to the PC you’ve restored, boot from it, and access the File Transfer Wizard. Navigate to the original backup and find the archive file corresponding to the partition where the boot files are located. Double click the file to open it, find the file called BCD, and copy it to the clipboard. Then restore BCD to the same partition on your drive, overwriting the current BCD file.

For drive copy

For a GPT system, these instructions assume that you’ve enabled the option to create a new EFI boot entry when copying.

1. After copying the drive, create a backup of the boot partition on the original drive. It must be a backup and not a copy, because the program updates the BCD on copy. By boot partition I refer to System Reserved on MBR drives, and EFI System Partition (99 MB FAT32) on GPT drives. On a side note, in Microsoft terminology they are called “system partition” rather than “boot partition”. If your system is MBR-based and doesn’t have a special boot partition, the following instructions still apply, but you’ll need to be making file-level backups of the C:\Boot\ folder rather than a partition.
2. Use the HDM or Windows Disk Management to assign a volume letter to the system partition on the new drive. This letter is referred to as [volume letter] in the further instructions.
3. Use the Windows tool bcdedit.exe to edit your current BCD, redirecting it to the new system. Launch Command Prompt as administrator, then execute:
   bcdedit /set {current} device partition=[volume letter]:
bcdedit /set {current} osdevice partition=[volume letter]:
4. Restart the system without changing any BIOS settings to verify that it boots into the new (copied) drive.
5. Boot from a Linux-based Paragon recovery media and launch the File Transfer Wizard. Find your original boot partition (that we’ve just edited), copy all its contents into the clipboard, and “restore” them into the new boot partition, overwriting the files.
6. Still on the Linux recovery media, use the FTW to overwrite the contents of the original boot partition with the contents you backed up in #1.

After #1-5, you should be able to successfully boot from either drive.

Backup & Recovery, Drive Copy, Hard Disk Manager™ for Windows, Migrate OS to SSD
Tags: backup, compatibility, copy, issue, migration, windows

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