To make a long story short, I buggered up the Windows 10 installation on my wife's PC while trying to address a GPU issue. Fortunately, I had been saving regular system images to a spare HD on her machine using the Windows System Image utility--including one from earlier that day. Unfortunately, I'm running into no end of trouble trying to restore from those images.

The drives in question:

Disk 0 = 1TB backup SATA drive containing images (MBR)

Disk 1 = 1TB NVME drive originally with windows installation (MBR)

Disk 2 = 32GB USB recovery drive

What I've done so far:

-Use the Windows Recovery Media utility on my Windows 11 machine to create a USB recovery drive

-Verify that I'm booting in legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI

-Boot into recovery mode from the recovery drive

-Open command prompt, use diskpart to clear Disk 1, create a new MBR volume (same as the install used to create the images), and format that volume as NTFS

-Use "System Image Recovery" option, select image from the backup drive

-Ensure Disk 1 is unchecked in the "exclude disks" menu of the Image Recovery tool

-Get "The system image recovery failed" with error code 0x80042412 in the details dialog

-Run chkdsk on Disk 0 and 1 (no errors)

-Run through about every possible iteration and permutation of the above steps, while referencing how-tos on the topic

From the few forum posts I can find on the topic, one of the big problems is people trying to restore an image to a volume that's smaller than the volume that was imaged. But this is the exact same drive the image was created from.

The only thing I haven't chased down fully is using the "Install Drivers" option in the recovery tool--mainly because I can't figure out what drivers I might need. And I figured since diskpart has no problem reading and modifying the drive, it's probably not a storage device driver issue.

In hindsight, I should have just cloned the drive instead of messing with images, but here I am... Any tips or suggestions are appreciated!

(The ironic thing is I was getting ready to help her pick out a Linux distro to migrate to. That's still the plan, but I'd like to get her back to a stable Windows install on the side to ease the transition)