Re-image system disk fails error 0x80042412

[madkiwi]

I have Windows 7 64 bit on an Asus UL80Vt notebook. Came with a Maxtor 320 GB drive. I want to replace it with an OCZ 60 GB SSD.

I was told the a System image can only go on a drive that is the same size or bigger than the source drive. I read a tutorial on benchmarkreviews.com that said the trick was to use the Shrink Volume command in Drive Management and reduce the size of my C: drive before making the restore image. Its new size was 45 GB.

I then used the Windows system image to make a copy of the drive and saved it on to my Western Digital MyBook. All went well.

Opened the system, swapped out the drives, rebooted to my Windows Repair CD, followed the instructions to get to the System Image Restore option. It found the image on my USB drive, no problem. However when it got to the screen to "Choose additional restore options" the Format and repartition disks option was grayed out and I had a message that I should install drivers for my device. OCZ Agility drives don't have drivers. I think this is important.

Next I chose to proceed and for 2 seconds all looked good until I got a message- "Re-Image your computer. The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found." When I click on details a get a bunch of gobbledy-gook about 1) System disk may have been excluded by mistake 2) USB disk may have been assigned as a system disk, 3) An invalid disk may have been assigned as system disk and an error code (0x80042412).

I checked out 1 and 2 and they were fine (each item came with "helpful" hints). So I am guessing 3 is the problem.

The drive shows up in DISKPART. It shows up in the BIOS. It is not formatted, but that should not matter. I am about ready to give up, but before I do I will try just doing a fresh Windows install. If that doesn't work I will post here.

I read a post elsewhere that intimated that Image restores only work to the exact same model hard drive. That can not be true, I have seen too many posts about people doing exactly what I am attempting.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[SMOKKINU]

Im having the exact same issue...

 

[madkiwi]

I RMA'd the drive and sent it back to OCZ. If the replacement also has problems then I will have to suspect something with the Asus BIOS or chipset as being incompatible with the SSD.

I am keeping my fingers crossed.

 

[WedgeBob]

Yeah, I'm starting to have this problem. I had the system image written to a 500GB hard drive, and replaced my Acer Aspire's 500GB HDD with an X25-M 120GB, and then I used GParted to repartition the system image drive to around 80 GB, maybe a little less, and this issue occured, too, that I know of. I'm hoping that either Intel's software, and/or another solution may work. Intel makes a cool SSD, tho, just wish that I would have known about the size difference issue "bait and switch" that Microsoft was pulling here for doing Windows Restore to other drives.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Apparently Paragon is making a tool to get around this:

Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - Overview

You can migrate from a big partition on an HD to a smaller SSD by excluding certain folders. You don't have to resize any partitions.

$20; I have no idea how well it works.

 

[whs]

Well, you guys are skipping a few steps:

1. You have to align the SSD and allocate an active partition before you use it for reimaging.. You can do that attaching it to a USB port - if nothing else. See alignment instructions here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html?ltr=S If you do not align it, you will have a hell of a time with the performance. If you have no active partition, you will not be able to boot.

2. Using the windows7 imaging is very hazardous. It's reliability and complexity does not make it my first choice. But we can discuss the options depending on your current installation.

3. The Paragon tool that was linked above is probably the easiest solution. There you cannot make any big mistakes. And Paragon has years of experience with imaging. I am sure it can be trusted - although I have not used it yet. It is brand new.

Bottom line: Your Agility was probably perfectly good for the task.

 

[WedgeBob]

Ah, cool...thanks for that advice. I was this close to having to buy an OEM copy of Home Premium or so in order to clean install and have to download everything a la carte from Acer which would have been an even bigger pain. Glad you saw this workaround coming. Great Kudos to both you, whs, and ignatzatsonic. That saved me even more money than it's worth.

Although my last ditch effort would be to install an OEM copy of Windows, install Paragon, and see if restoring the WindowsSystemImage would bring the settings back that way...that's probably a long shot. I only wish that I would have known about Paragon before I swapped out the drive to the SSD. Sigh.

EDIT: Well, looks like that's probably what I'm gonna have to do now, guys, hate to break it to you. Just ordered an OEM copy of Home Premium from Amazon, and should expect it just before Christmas, probably. I'm gonna see if installing Paragon and restoring the image from within a clean copy of Windows is the only answer to this. If not, well, I'm gonna have to manually install everything from Acer, which will not be fun.

 

[Dale Mahalko]

(Yes, this is a very old thread. But it is the top Google hit for error 0x80042412.)

I found a solution to this system recovery problem. Basically there's something about the target restore drive that is making Windows 7 reject it as a restore candidate. (In my case I'm trying to upgrade from a 256 gig SSD to a 512 meg SSD using system restore.)

The solution is to go to the command prompt and do some preformatting of the target drive/SSD using diskpart.

If you're unfamiliar with diskpart, it is best to unplug / eject your backup drive containing the recovery image, so you don't accidentally destroy it doing the following.

Open the command prompt and type:
diskpart
list disk
(For me my new SSD is disk 0, but could be different for you.)
select disk 0
clean
(clean wipes out all existing drive partitioning.)
create partition primary size=100 align=4096
(aligning improves performance on SSD's and newer hard drives with 4096 byte sectors)
format quick fs=ntfs
active
create partition primary align=4096
format quick fs=ntfs
exit


At this point the target restore drive has been formatted and looks like a generic Windows boot drive, with a 100 meg reserved boot partition, and a second OS/data partition using all remaining space.

Now you can reconnect your restore image drive, and re-imaging onto the new drive works (for me anyway) without a problem.

 

[Disneyprince]

This solution works brilliantly. Thank you Dale.

 

[Yogi76]

I just wanted to say thanks to Dale, as well. His suggestion worked perfectly.

On a related note, it seems like every time I go to restore from a system image created using the built-in Windows backup tool, I get some type of error that needs to be resolved. I'm wondering if that's why Microsoft has de-emphasized their built-in backup tool so much in Windows 8.1.

 

[4262mikeb]

A new variation on the theme ...
I just bought an hp laptop with a 750Gb hdd for a co-worker. I also bought an SSD. The hdd was partitioned with (in order) system, c:\ , hp_tools, hp_recovery partitions.
I shrunk the c: partition so it would fit on the ssd and then made an image on a usb drive.
Then swap out the hdd for the ssd , boot from recovery CD but I get the "Re-Image your computer. The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found." message.
I futz around for 4 hours or so with diskpart permutations before finally figuring out that I need to delete the 2 hp hdd partitions as they're on the hdd in a space that doesn't exist on the SSD and presumably the partition table gets restored too. After deleting the hp partitions the restore worked first time. Hope this helps someone.


added this info later..
a few hours later I discover I need the hp_tools partition to get fingerprint logon to work.. so I shrink the c:\ partition on the ssd by 2gb create a new fat32 partition in the created space and call it HP_TOOLS and copy the files I backed up from the HP_TOOLS partition on the old HDD before I deleted that partition.

 

[pcs1]

Although my problem was on Windows Server 2008R2, it was exactly the same problem as others here were having with Windows 7.
Having tried everything suggested here with no success I eventually re-installed the operating system onto the new drive, my theory being that this would prepare the geometry of the drive to correctly receive the backup.
I then re ran the installation CD, selected the Repair and restore options and restored over the top of the new installation. The restoration then proceeded correctly and everything was ok again

 

[gulp]

(Yes, this is a very old thread. But it is the top Google hit for error 0x80042412.)

I found a solution to this system recovery problem. Basically there's something about the target restore drive that is making Windows 7 reject it as a restore candidate. (In my case I'm trying to upgrade from a 256 gig SSD to a 512 meg SSD using system restore.)

The solution is to go to the command prompt and do some preformatting of the target drive/SSD using diskpart.

If you're unfamiliar with diskpart, it is best to unplug / eject your backup drive containing the recovery image, so you don't accidentally destroy it doing the following.

Open the command prompt and type:
diskpart
list disk
(For me my new SSD is disk 0, but could be different for you.)
select disk 0
clean
(clean wipes out all existing drive partitioning.)
create partition primary size=100 align=4096
(aligning improves performance on SSD's and newer hard drives with 4096 byte sectors)
format quick fs=ntfs
active
create partition primary align=4096
format quick fs=ntfs
exit


At this point the target restore drive has been formatted and looks like a generic Windows boot drive, with a 100 meg reserved boot partition, and a second OS/data partition using all remaining space.

Now you can reconnect your restore image drive, and re-imaging onto the new drive works (for me anyway) without a problem.

Highly hopefully heartened, I tried this to the letter with my WD USB HDD but got the dreaded Re-image system disk fails error 0x80042412 again. Now I do not see the drive in This PC. I have dis- & re-connected it and done re-starts. The PC does know about it in some ways as I see it listed via list disk.exe and the image restore process found it.

How can I get it back into This PC please? I'm using W8.1

 

[peku]

Many thanks to Dale!!

Great!
BUT for me, this need to add one little thing:
(I don't know how to do it in cmd mode, but I used "MiniTool-Partition-Wizard-Home-Edition" to do that)

Volume label should be exact the same between backup disk and active part of target disk
For me, it means that I need to Label my target disk active part as: SYSTEM



I backup my windows 7 starter (HP Mini 110-3110) 160GB WD HDD and restore it to Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD Drive. I also need to shrink my windows partition and move partitions so that "empty" partition 40GB was in the end of the WD disk before I made backup. I did that also with MiniTool-Partition-Wizard-Home-Edition. For Backup and Restore I used windows 7 own maintenance tools. Works fine but, boot time degreased only about 5 seconds, from 50s -> 45s

 

[gulp]

I am now considering Macrium and came across this but cannot find any comments on the method.

https://sites.google.com/site/macriumresize/

Being unsure of myself in this partition/resizing area has anyone other than the author tried it? Also, as it uses tools from within Windows, I am surprised that MS don't appear to suggest it (as far as I can see).

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Here's the first sentence from your link:

"A major limitation of Macrium Reflect is that it cannot restore images to a drive that is smaller than the original one."

That's false as far as I know.

I stopped right there when I saw that and didn't read any more.

What is important is the occupied space on the partitions that you image.

That's a number in gigabytes.

An example:

You have a 500 GB drive containing only a C partition of 500 GB.

100 GB of that 500 is occupied. 400 is unoccupied.

Suppose you make an image of that C drive.

You CAN restore that image to a drive of less than 500 GB.

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Vasileiadis]

(Yes, this is a very old thread. But it is the top Google hit for error 0x80042412.)

I found a solution to this system recovery problem. Basically there's something about the target restore drive that is making Windows 7 reject it as a restore candidate. (In my case I'm trying to upgrade from a 256 gig SSD to a 512 meg SSD using system restore.)

The solution is to go to the command prompt and do some preformatting of the target drive/SSD using diskpart.

If you're unfamiliar with diskpart, it is best to unplug / eject your backup drive containing the recovery image, so you don't accidentally destroy it doing the following.

Open the command prompt and type:
diskpart
list disk
(For me my new SSD is disk 0, but could be different for you.)
select disk 0
clean
(clean wipes out all existing drive partitioning.)
create partition primary size=100 align=4096
(aligning improves performance on SSD's and newer hard drives with 4096 byte sectors)
format quick fs=ntfs
active
create partition primary align=4096
format quick fs=ntfs
exit


At this point the target restore drive has been formatted and looks like a generic Windows boot drive, with a 100 meg reserved boot partition, and a second OS/data partition using all remaining space.

Now you can reconnect your restore image drive, and re-imaging onto the new drive works (for me anyway) without a problem.

Simpler solution (this one didn't work for me):

Select disk 0
Select partition 1
Delete partition
Select partition 2
Delete partition
Etc

Create partition primary
Active

Select disk 0
Format fs = ntfs quick
Select disk 0
Assign letter=c (this letter should match the one on your primary partition of your source drive)

Detail disk to verify letter, ntfs and the fact it only has one volume

Then proceed

 

[tpriest]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I cannot get past this error message.

I'm trying to take the image of my system partition to an SSD. It seems that no matter what I try the restore fails with the message "Re-Image your computer. The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found.".

Now for the details.

It's a desktop PC running Windows 7 Pro. The "old" system drive is on a 200GB partition (Belarc gives it as 215.26GB), the remainder of that 1TB drive was my data partition but as errors are starting to occur on that partition I'm going to junk the drive; the data has already been moved to a new spinning drive.

I've bought a 512GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD to be my new system drive.

Using the built-in Windows 7 facilities I've created an image of the C: to an external USB 3 connected drive, also a Windows 7 Repair disk.

I connected the SSD inside the PC, booted Windows and ran DISKPART as recommended to create a single partition. Closed down Windows and then connected the SSD inside the PC using the same SATA cable as the original HDD and disconnected the original system HDD as well as the other (new) HDD.

Booted from the Repair CD and installed the USB 3 drivers. The restore feature then saw the new system image. Exclude Disks lists the SSD, as well as a USB stick containing the USB 3 drivers. I then initiate the restore. After 2 or 3 seconds it fails with the error message above.

What am I doing wrong?

I've tried various DISKPART options, creating a 100MB partition then using the rest of the SSD for the main partition; creating a 200GB partition. All to no avail.

Help please.

I had a thought and wondered if the Windows 7 install disk would be happy. I was, I aborted the install after a few minutes. It may be that I'll bite the bullet the do a full clean install.

 

[tpriest]

Maybe bad form to reply to my own post, if so my apologies.

I decided to go for a clean install on the SSD. It's all now up and running, just a few more programs to install.

 

[JohnnyTabasco]

Thank you Dale! After following your instructions I am now seeing "Restoring disk (C)...", which is a wonderful sight.