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System Image recovery from bootable WinPE flash/usb drive.
Hi Everyone,
I have a bit of a peculiar issue going on here. While I somewhat understand what is happening, I'm still slightly confused as to why and if there is an alternative/workaround.
So I want to restore a system image from one of the workstations I have. I have a custom made WinPE flash drive with several bells and whistles added to make my life easier at work. If I boot to my WinPE OS and initiate the image recovery. All goes well until it tries to apply the image to the drive and then it immediately fails with the lovely 0x80070057 error code.
If I perform the exact same steps, however boot to a DVD rather than the flash drive, it works every time. I found a bit of info elsewhere on this and was hoping someone here could explain this behavior in a bit more detail as the post the guy made doesn't fully make sense to me....
So basically I'm looking for a workaround to be able to perform an image recovery from the bootable USB drive. Not that I can't carry around a DVD version of it as well, I'd just prefer to have everything working from my swiss army PE drive...I called MS and they told me that you can't do an image restore unless ALL the drives are exactly as they were. Meaning when I was using my jump drive to initiate the recovery (because I can't eject the recovery disk to put in the image disk), it was counting that as a drive. So no go on using a jump drive to initiate the Windows Recovery Environment. That was what was the "the parameter is incorrect; 0x80070057" error.
I figured out a workaround that I should have seen INSTANTLY. All this time, it's been there. When you're selecting an image, Microsoft realized some people might have their images on external drives which require special drivers. You just go there and wala, you see a Browse icon. Go in there, right-click the optical drive, eject, put in the one with the image.
(Note: it's not the custom PE that causes this. I've retried with a 7Ent DVD and USB created with the same iso, with the same result. DVD works, USB doesn't)