Question Can't install disk image from recovery drive, keeps booting into normal windows.

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
361
6
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I'm trying to reinstall a disk image (wind 10) to fix an issue I'm having, I put a recovery disk in and booted from it and it went into the normal options to let me troubleshoot then recover a disk image. I have 3 NVME drives so I excluded the two that weren't the system drive and tried to recover the image but it threw up a message saying I may have excluded a system drive by mistake and it wouldn't proceed. I checked and didn't seem to have done this so as a belt and braces I physically pulled the two non-system drives out of the machine leaving the C: and tried again to boot into the recovery disk but now it just keeps booting into normal Windows and won't let me into the troubleshoot option to try and install the disk image. It gives me the boot option and I can select the DVD drive but it just goes straight to desktop.

The first time I tried booting from the disk it went straight from the boot menu into the keyboard choice/troubleshoot option but after pulling the drives it goes from the boot menu to a 'press any key to boot from DVD' screen and I'm not sure it's responding to my key presses.

Any ideas?

Edit: Just wanted to confirm, in the 'exclude drives' screen when installing the disk image the boxes you tick are for the drives to exclude or include?
 
Last edited:

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
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What are the specs on this computer? Are you trying to restore from a backup image or just reinstall the OS? (This wasn't clear to me) So what software are you using? What is this recovery disk?

If you just want to reinstall windows, you can make a new USB installer using the media creation tool and Rufus or Ventoy with a flash drive. And of course, make sure you back up your data.
 

boing

Senior member
Sep 13, 2001
361
6
81
System specs are as below, I'm using Windows built in disk imaging software to restore a backup I made in Feb of 2025 after I started developing errors and system instability (tried system restore, didn't work). Sorry, meant 'repair disk' not recovery, just to let me boot into troubleshooting/restore from image options. I don't really want to do a clean install as the image I made was stable, I'd rather just jump back to that point.

CPU - Threadripper 1950X
MB - Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7
GPU - Gigabyte AORUS GTX 1080 Ti
HDD C: - Samsung Evo 980 500GB
Alternate drives - Samsung Evo 960 500GB/1TB
RAM - G Skill F4-3200C14-8GFX (64GB)
OS - Win 10 64 bit.
PSU - Seasonic SSR - 750 GD