Windows System Restore. Windows System Restore Performing a procedure using a flash drive

Operating Windows systems 8 and 8.1 allow you to create a bootable recovery disk using standard tools. It is a regular USB flash drive that boots into the Windows Recovery Environment (that is, limited diagnostic mode), which allows you to repair startup, file system or fix other issues that cause the operating system to not boot or run with tangible problems.

A boot disk for Windows is useful in that you can use it to start system recovery, update the system, and reset your computer to its original - working - parameters.

It should be noted, however, that the disc or media cannot be used for Windows installation. At the same time, the boot disk is very similar to the one used to restore Windows 7.

The recovery disc (in the USB version) or the system repair disc (for the CD/DVD version, only available in Windows 8) is intended for those who do not have an official boot disk Windows 8/8.1.

I strongly recommend that you create a system recovery disk or flash drive before you get into an unpleasant situation - if you can’t start Windows 8 or 8.1, you can easily and effortlessly return the OS to a healthy state using the prepared kit.

Keep in mind that a 32-bit (x86) recovery disc can be used to fix Windows 8/8.1 32-bit. Accordingly, the 64-bit (x64) edition of the recovery disk only works with 64-bit Windows 8/8.1.

Good point: you can repair any edition Microsoft Windows 8/8.1 from this disk if it is for the same hardware architecture (32-bit or 64-bit). One final note: don't try to use the Windows 8.1 recovery disc to revive Windows 8 and vice versa!

Requirements for creating a Windows 8/8.1 boot disk or system recovery disk

First, make sure you have a blank CD/DVD (this is only a requirement for Windows environments 8) or a USB drive with a minimum size of 256 MB (megabytes) of the total disk space. Many OEM computers have strictly individual recovery partitions - they can require up to 32 gigabytes of disk space on a recovery drive.

The CD or DVD drive in Windows 8 must be really empty, because the program will not be able to write data to rewritable media. You can clear the contents of a CD or DVD by opening My Computer (keyboard shortcut Windows+E), right-clicking on the CD/DVD drive logo in the list, and selecting Erase This Disc.

A USB drive can be a simple portable flash drive or hard drive with a similar USB interface. Please note that this hard drive will be formatted and you will lose all files on it. Therefore, it will not be superfluous to backup all important files! Be careful. If you delete valuable files, they will have to be restored (about the resuscitation of a flash drive to the site).

After creating the recovery disk, you need to make sure that your computer is able to boot normally. Some older USB sticks do not support booting. Also, don't forget to check your computer's boot order in the BIOS to make sure that booting from USB devices is enabled and is on the list before booting hard drives.

If your computer is equipped USB interfaces 2.0 and USB 3.0 or later, plug the recovery disk into a USB 2.0 port - this may solve some problems with booting the system.

Create a bootable USB flash drive for Windows recovery

To start creating a boot disk, open the search settings using the Windows key + W and type "Recovery" in the search box. Click on "Create a recovery drive".

As expected, the User Account Control window appears. Click the "Yes" button to make sure you know what you're doing.

You will see the "Create Recovery Drive" window. First, check the "Copy the contents of the recovery partition to disk" option. Then plug in the USB drive, wait about 10 seconds and click Next.

If you cannot enable the "Copy the contents of the recovery partition to the recovery drive" option when creating a recovery drive in Windows 8 or 8.1, you need to copy windows installer instll.wim to your hard drive or SSD drive. Please note that this will increase the available space requirements on the default recovery drive from 256 megabytes to 4 gigabytes respectively.

If the message "We cannot create a recovery disc on this computer. Some required files are missing" appears when creating a Windows recovery disc, the winre.wim file or the system reserved partition is missing.

Select the correct drive letter in the list, specify the USB flash drive in the window. Then click the "Next" button.

Windows will warn you that all contents of the selected drive will be cleared. To continue, click the "Create" button.

The disk formatting and file copying process may take several minutes, depending on the speed of your USB drive. Once the disk is ready, click the "Finish" button.

The end of the process of creating a bootable windows 8 flash drive

Now check that your device is really able to boot from the recovery disk: some older USB drives don't support booting. In this case, make a newer recovery disk on the flash drive and re-test the drive for bootability. Now open the flash drive in any file manager and make sure the content matches what you see in the screenshot below:

Creating an Old School Boot CD/DVD for System Recovery in Windows 8

If you want to create a bootable CD or System Recovery DVD (only available in Windows 8), open the search for Windows+W key settings, type "recovery" and click "Windows 7 File Restore" (yes, that's it). glitch, in fact, the option has such a name).

If you cannot find the item you are looking for, open a command prompt window (use the Windows key + X), type sdclt.exe and press Enter to launch the program.

On the left side of the Recovery window Microsoft files Windows 7, click the "Create System Repair Disc" button.

The "Create System Recovery Disc" window opens. Select the desired successor and click the "Create Disc" button.

If you insert a non-blank CD or DVD, you will see an error dialog like this: "The system recovery media was not created, there is no media in the device (0xC0AA0202)". Click OK, paste empty disk and the recording process will start automatically.

Right-click on your CD or DVD drive, select the Erase This Disc option.

It may take several minutes to create the system recovery disc. After the process is completed, specify the name of the disk and click the "Close" button.

Summary. I hope that this instruction helped you create bootable flash drive to restore Microsoft Windows 8. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments, I will definitely answer them (see below).

Answers to questions from readers

After restoring Windows 8, files and some programs disappeared. How can I return/restore them?

Answer. You must understand that restoring windows 8 from a disc or other media assumes that everything installed programs are deleted, they will need to be reinstalled. However, if you installed Windows on a different drive, you can go to the user folder (Users - [username]) on system drive used by the previous OS. In the Application Data subdirectory, look for user files with configuration files applications, they can be copied to the current user folder. That's just actually Windows applications will need to be installed from the installation files.

If you installed Windows 8 on the default system drive and lost old version OS, look for the Windows.old folder. It stores copies of previously installed programs.

Laptop crash after uninstall Windows 8. Before that, there was also no archiving. And now, having returned something, I do not find some files: office program, your notes, etc. Update Center not working. It is impossible to find deleted files, default is everywhere. How to restore windows 8 to normal as before?

Answer. It looks like you used a restore point a few days ago. However, the question is worded in such a way that it is not clear what you wanted to ask. Let's try to answer point by point.

1. office suite The easiest way to install is by downloading the installation package on the developer's website.

2. Work center windows updates 8 Depends on the Windows Update service. Start - Run - services.msc. Find the specified service, switch to the "Automatic" state, reboot the system.

3. To recover deleted files, use specialized programs, we have written about them many times.

If you restore the system via a usb flash drive (on Windows 8), will the system be restored to the factory settings or to the time the recovery disk was created?

Answer. Windows entry 8 to a flash drive is just a convenient way to reinstall without using a floppy drive.

You can write windows 8 to a USB flash drive and reinstall from scratch, but you will need to configure, install programs, and so on again. If you use Windows restore points, then you return to the state in which the OS was fixed at the time the point was created.

Creating a system image

To restore a system from an image, you must first create it, so let's start with that. The system is created using a utility with the strange name "Windows 7 File Recovery" (Windows 7 File Recovery). (Why not just call it "File Recovery" or "Windows Backup"?)

To launch this utility, press the +[W] keys to search by options and type keywords"file recovery". In the results, select "Windows 7 File Recovery" (Figure A).

Figure A Starting Windows 7 File Recovery from the Start screen is easy.

In the window that opens, click on the “Create a system image” link in the left pane. On the first page of the wizard that appears, you need to choose where the image will be stored. I'm going to use multiple DVD+Rs for this, as shown in fig. b.

Figure B On my test computer, I'll save the system image on multiple DVD+R discs.

Click Next. You will be prompted to confirm the backup settings (Figure C). As you can see, in addition to the main partition, the System Reserved partition is included in the image. On my test machine, which is now almost empty, the system estimates the size of the image to be 36 GB (at the end of the procedure, the compressed image took only three 4.7 GB DVD+R discs). When you're ready, click the "Start backup" button.

Figure C At the stage of confirming the archiving parameters, review the information provided and click the "Archive" button.

In preparation for archiving, the system will prompt you to sign and insert the first DVD (Figure D).

Figure D Insert the first disc and click OK.

After inserting the first disk, you will be prompted to format it. Check the "Don't ask me again for this backup" box to have all the following disks for this image automatically formatted, and click the "Format" button. After that, the system will start formatting, as shown in Fig. E.

Figure E Don't forget to check the "Don't ask a question about this backup" box.

During archiving, you can monitor the process on the progress bar. After writing the data, the system performs verification and prompts you to insert the next disk (Fig. F).

Figure F When the image is burned to DVD, the system performs data verification.

When the backup is complete, you will be prompted to create a System Repair disc (Figure G). But this is the same as the Windows 8 Recovery Drive (Recovery Drive), and if you already have it, you can click "No" (No). After that, a message will appear indicating that the backup was successful.

Figure G In Windows 8, the system repair disc is the same as just the recovery disc.

Now that you have a system image, you are ready for any trouble.

Starting System Restore from an Image

In the event of a hard drive failure, you can use the System Image Recovery tool available on the recovery drive. I have a recovery disk created on a USB drive, but it could just as well be a CD / DVD (as part of the experiment, I booted the system with optical disc recovery - the results were the same).

After booting the computer from the recovery disk and reaching the choice of action, click the "Diagnostics" button (Troubleshoot, Fig. H).

Figure H On the action selection screen, click the Diagnostics button.

On the "Diagnostics" screen (Fig. I), select " Extra options» (Advanced options).

Figure I On the Diagnostics screen, select Advanced Options.

On the Advanced Options screen (Figure J), ​​select System Image Recovery.

Figure J On the Advanced Options screen, select System Image Recovery.

You will be prompted to select a system to restore (Figure K). The item may be superfluous, but in any case, you will have to press the "Windows 8" button to continue.

Figure K Select Windows 8.

Recovery process

After selecting Windows 8, the System Restore Image Wizard will launch and immediately begin searching for media with an archived image (Figure L).

Figure L The System Restore from Image wizard will immediately begin searching for media containing the backup image.

If the wizard cannot find the image, you will be prompted to insert a disc. Please note that when restoring from multiple DVDs, the disc that was burned last must be inserted first (Figure M). The fact is that when creating a system image, the information necessary for recovery is written to the last disk.

Figure M The information needed for recovery is written to the last disk.

When the last disk is inserted, the wizard reads the data recorded on it and displays information about the system image (Fig. N). As you can see, in my example, the image on drive "F" was created on February 25 at 11:28 pm and is intended for a computer named "Jovian-8". When you're ready, click Next.

Figure N When the recovery wizard is ready to go, the system image information will appear on the screen.

The next wizard screen (Figure O) will open with several options. If the system is restored to the same hard drive, there is no need to reformat it (I chose this option for testing, but the end result was exactly the same, only the process was longer). When restoring to new hard the drive option to format and partition will most likely be selected by default. If the new hard drive is the same or larger than the old one, there is nothing to worry about.

Figure O The second screen of the Recovery Wizard offers several additional options.

If your computer has multiple hard drives, you can click the Exclude Disks button and check which drives you don't want to process. The "Advanced" button brings up a dialog box with two additional options. Automatic reboot is selected by default, and in addition, you can enable checking the disk for errors during recovery. If these options are not available, you may need to install drivers for the drive by clicking the Install Drivers button.

Figure P Click Finish to complete the wizard.

Another confirmation will appear (Figure Q). Click "Yes" (Yes) to start the recovery process.

Figure Q In the final confirmation dialog, click Yes.

After that, you will be prompted to insert the first of the burned image DVDs (Figure R). Insert a disc and click OK.

Figure R At the beginning of the operation, you will be prompted to insert the first image DVD.

You can monitor the progress of the restore using the progress bar. Depending on the size of the hard drive, recovery may take several hours. When you're done with one DVD, you'll be prompted to insert the next one, and so on.

When the restore is complete, you will be prompted to click the Restart now button. And if you are not at the computer at this moment, the system will reboot on its own (Fig. S).

Figure S If no one is at the computer when the restore is complete, the system will reboot on its own.

After the reboot, the familiar login screen will appear.

What do you think?

Have you ever restored a system from an image? Share your experience in the comments!

Windows 8 has a fairly rich arsenal of recovery tools. First of all, this is the Refresh Your PC mode, the launch of which allows you to restore the OS from the recovery disk without deleting user files. Along with such a "soft" form of bringing the OS configuration to a working state, the "eight" implements a tool for completely reinstalling it with deleting all data on the disk (Reset Your PC).

Variety of recovery tools

The developers have provided users with several ways at once, resorting to which you can restore the windows 8 system. Some of them are familiar to previous versions windows, some are unique and are not even in the new "top ten". We list all the available options:

Below we describe in detail how to restore windows 8, the advantages and disadvantages of each of the methods described.

Update without deleting files

Not everyone knows that this option works in two modes:

• keeping the user's personal files, Metro apps, and deleting all desktop apps and registry settings;
• returning the system to a custom image with the preservation of all programs and settings installed at the time of its creation, with all drivers, etc.

The first mode will be uncontested if Windows 8 was installed by the user on his own from a disk and he did not create wim-images of the system for subsequent rollback.

But when buying a device with the eighth installed by the manufacturer Windows version during the Refresh Your PC function, a hidden factory disk partition with a specific set of drivers and programs originally installed on the computer will be used.

In order to be able to “softly” restore windows 8 to a fully working system configuration without errors, viruses, etc., after installing the system, drivers and the most necessary applications, you need to make your own wim image. They can also replace the standard one used by default.

How to make a wim image

For editing and creating images in the G8, the recimg console program is provided. We will use it as follows:

1. open command line on behalf of the administrator, for which press Win + X and select the appropriate item in the console window that opens.
2. On the command line, write recimg/CreateImage C:\Image\Img1 (without the dot).

The program will create an image on disk current state, which will become the base when the system is rolled back without deleting files.

You can create more than one image, the user can choose how many to make:

• recimg/CreateImage C:\Images\Img2 will create another recovery image and make it the base image;
• recimg/SetCurrent C:\Image\Img1 will make Img1 the base again;

• recimg /ShowCurrent will show which image is currently the base image;
• recimg/deregister will discard all user images and make the system's factory image the default.

The Wim image does not contain user data, so it is not suitable as a full-fledged backup. However, when you roll back the Refresh mode (system restore in windows 8 with saving user data), the OS will save all your programs, files, and registry data that were relevant at the time the image was created.

What will be left after the rollback

Rollback with saving data, as previously described, can be carried out through a saved image or without it. This will affect the system as follows:

• in both cases, documents and personal files, design and Metro applications will remain unchanged;
• when using the image, the desktop applications of the Program Files folder, updates and all system settings.

The only things that won't be saved are most of your personal settings (desktop, etc.) and application settings (browser profile, saved program panels, etc.).

How to run the Refresh Your PC procedure

Restoring windows 8 using this procedure can be done in almost any of its states, even when you can enter it only from the boot disk. But if Windows 8 boots normally, the rollback process comes down to a few steps:

• press Win + R and in the input field of the window that opens, write the systemreset command (without a comma),
• Confirm your entry by clicking "Run".

Changing BIOS settings

But if redirection does not occur, the download is carried out from the recovery or installation disk. Before that, do not forget to go into BIOS mode and check that the priorities are set correctly so that the boot or installation drives are read first.

To enter the BIOS, you need to immediately press Del on the keyboard several times as soon as the device starts rebooting; on some laptops, you enter through F2 or ESC. BIOS versions on different devices differ. It can be Award, AMI, graphical UEFI - everywhere the way to set the disk, the first one in the boot queue, is different. However, you can boot from a USB flash drive without entering the BIOS. To display a window for selecting a boot method without changing the BIOS settings, just press the following keys during device startup:

• Award BIOS - F9;
• AMI-F8.

On laptops, this tool is usually invoked by pressing F12.

Entering the recovery environment

Do the following:

1. When downloading from installation disk after selecting the language, click on the link below "System Restore";
2. Go to the diagnostics section;
3. Select the "Restore" command.

After the procedure is completed, any of your programs and all system settings will remain in place (except for some personal settings), but only if you managed to make a wim image using the method described above. Otherwise, a clean system will be installed, in which only photos, music and similar data will be saved.

The difference between updating with saving data and reinstalling the OS over an existing one

Reinstalling the system is usually resorted to only when there are no backups in order to restore windows 8 through Refresh Your PC. But one more condition must be observed - the system must boot independently.

This is just the advantage and the main difference between rolling back with saving data from reinstalling - new mode returning the working configuration of the system in the "eight" is able to bring it back to life even with the most severe failure, while preserving at least the user's personal data.

Another important feature - Refresh Your PC takes a very short time, the process is fully automated. No initial steps classic way there is no need to reinstall from the disk, nor do you need to configure settings after installation is complete.

Recovery without saving data

IN English versions Windows 8, this mode is called Reset Your PC and acts "hard" - it formats the system, and any other partition, after which it completely reinstalls the system. No data, system or user settings are saved. The Reset Your PC mode is available in the same place - in the diagnostics section, which can be accessed both from a running system and from a recovery or installation disk.

With a version of Windows 8 preinstalled on a computer or laptop, everything is even simpler. You just need to familiarize yourself with the specification for the device in order to find out how to roll back the windows 8 system by pressing a certain key combination to the factory settings. It varies on different machines, but this is the fastest of the existing methods“hard” to roll back almost to zero the system completely spoiled by a virus or inept actions of the user.

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Hello friends! If you read various computer forums on the Internet, you can find one unsolvable problem. This problem will also not be solved for you in any computer service and you will be offered to simply reinstall the operating system again. The problem is that in Windows 7, 8.1, 10 there is a built-in tool Reserve copy operating system, but in some cases this tool may not find the Windows backup image created (by itself) when restoring. As proof, I can give you my own article, written two years ago: "", if you read the comments on it, you will understand everything, or maybe you yourself found yourself in a similar situation and did not find a way out of it.

Any user personal computer sooner or later decides to back up your operating system, I must say, this is very convenient, you install the operating system on your computer (it is already installed on the new laptop from the store), then install everything necessary programs, after that you create a backup image of Windows, if after a year the computer behaves unstable, you simply restore Windows from a backup and that's it, so we come to the most important thing.

To create a backup copy of the operating system, many programs have been invented, both free and paid, for example: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional, but many users prefer the operating system archiving tool built into Windows, with which you can also create a backup copy of the OS and place it on a regular hard drive or portable USB hard drive. But it is not always possible to recover from this backup, and here's why.

• Note: Friends, in today's article I suggest using Acronis True Image Home 2014 to solve this problem, but not all users have this program, so I wrote two more articles, in the first I use the built-in Windows utility utility , and in the second, utility .

The point is the special whimsicality of the backup tool built into Windows. If you have created a backup built in Windows tool archiving, then after that it is undesirable to change the configuration hard drive(that is, divide it into additional partitions, change drive letters, etc.), it is also undesirable to touch the USB portable hard drive on which the backup is located, in no case should you change the folder name ( Windows Image Backup) in which the system archive is located or move it. Often, these conditions are not met by users, and when restoring, they will receive the following message: “Windows cannot find an image on this computer”.

Accordingly, the user is faced with the question of how then to restore. Despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation, there is still a way out and here it is!

So, for starters, let's create a backup copy of the disk (C:) using the built-in archiving tool. Lenovo laptop G710 with UEFI BIOS and Windows 8.1 installed from the store.

Laptop Disk Management

In this window we see that to the laptop, except for regular Disk 0 (volume 1 TB), portable HDD USB, also with a capacity of 1 TB, it is on it (on partition I :) that we will save a backup copy of the Windows 8.1 operating system (Disk C :).

We launch remedy withbacking up files using File History.

Click on the button System image backup.

In this window the tool Windows Backup 8.1 offers to save a system backup on a portable USB hard drive (section ( I:)).

The built-in archiving tool automatically includes sections in the backup:

1. Hidden encrypted (EFI) system partition (260 MB) without a letter containing files Windows boot 8.1.

2. Drive (C:) with installed Windows 8.1.

If you turn the scroll wheel down, you will see

that the backup will include another hidden partition without a letter, containing the Windows 8.1 Recovery Environment.

Note: In this screenshot, we see three partitions of the laptop hard drive that will be included in the backup archive.

We also see the partition (I:) of the portable hard disk, on which the archive will be saved.

In the "Confirm archiving parameters" window, we check whether we have configured everything correctly.

Click Archive and the archiving process will begin.

The backup process starts.

Archiving completed successfully.

After the archiving process is completed, go to the USB portable hard drive, partition (I :) and see the folder with the newly created backup archive called WindowsImageBackup, this is - Backup Windows Image.

We go to the archive WindowsImageBackup and find in it Backup folder, in this folder there are three files with the VHDX extension, given format is used in various Microsoft virtualization solutions.

In simple words, a built-in backup tool, converted the drive (C:) with Windows 8.1 installed, as well as two hidden section- to virtual files hard drives VHDX.

The very first file vhd X contains the Windows 8.1 operating system, this can be identified by the large file size. The other two VHDX files contain respectively two hidden partitions, the first with the recovery environment, and the second with system boot files (Esp.vhdx). You can also mount any virtual disk in« Disk management» and see its contents, not only that, you can even work with him.

Now imagine the situation, half a year has passed and your laptop for some reason has stopped loading, you decide to restore the laptop from the previously created backup archive WindowsImageBackup using the built-in backup tool. Connected a portable USB hard drive to the laptop, then booted the laptop from installation flash drive Windows 8.1, entered the recovery environment, selected in advanced options« Restoring a system image» ,

We find our virtual disk Windows 8.1.vhdx, select it with the left mouse and click Open.

The virtual hard disk is attached, in disk management, and assigned the letter (H:).

Acronis True Image 2016

Beginning of work. System backup.

We uncheck the boxes everywhere and mark only our connected virtual hard disk (H:).

In point Destination, Local storage, specify a portable USB hard drive to save the backup and click the button Archive.

Backup copy virtual disk VHDX in .TIB format of Acronis True Image 2016 is ready and located in the G:\My backups\Windows8_OS (H) folder on the portable USB hard drive.

In Acronis True Image 2016, we create .

I want to restore the drive (C:) of my laptop from a backup we created.

Note: For the purity of the experiment, before the recovery process, I will completely delete the drive (C :) with Windows 8.1 installed from the laptop, and then restore from our backup using a bootable flash drive with the programAcronis. Naturally, you do not have to do this, well, unless suddenly someone wants to quickly remove Windows on the command line.

We connect a portable USB hard drive to the laptop and boot the laptop from the bootable UEFI flash drives Acronis True Image

Choose Recovery. Disks.

Review. We need to find the backup we created, it is located on one of the partitions of the portable hard USB disk. Full path: G:\My backups\Windows8_OS (H), but since Acronis True Image confuses drive letters in the boot environment, the letter may not be G: but quite different.

Opening the item computer.

We go to the Local Disk (L :), it is similar in size to the partition of the USB portable hard drive on which the backup we created is located.

We go to the folder My backups.

Go to the Windows8_OS (H) folder.

Marking the partition for recovery Windows8_OS(H).

We do not mark the MBR item, since the hard drive of our laptop has the GPT partition style and the UEFI interface is enabled in the BIOS.

Click on the button New storage.

We mark with the left mouse the unallocated space 449.6 GB and click Accept.

Proceed.

The process of restoring the laptop from the backup we created begins.

We reboot the laptop and the error comes out again, which means inStop the crashed Windows 8.1 bootloader.

Restoring the Windows 8.1 bootloader

I connect a bootable USB flash drive with Windows 8.1 to the laptop and boot the laptop from it.

When the initial Windows 8.1 installation window appears, I press the combination Shift + F10 and the command line opens.

I enter commands:

diskpart

list vol (this command lists all partitions. We see that the partition with the Windows 8.1 operating system is assigned the letter C:)

exit (exit diskpart)

We enter a command that will completely overwrite the contents of the Windows 8.1 boot storage of the laptop.

bcdboot.exe C:\Windows

Download files successfully created!

We reboot the laptop and finally Windows 8.1 is loaded!

In Windows 8.1 (at least officially available on this moment distribution of Windows 8.1 Preview), Microsoft decided to abandon the graphical wizard of backup of the system image (Windows 7 backup tool) left over from the days of Windows 7.
In the recently leaked windows network 8.1 RTM still has a graphical wizard for creating a system image. Details at the end of the article.

Naturally, this does not mean that in Windows 8.1 it is impossible to create a backup copy of the system image using standard tools (do not confuse system image backup and File History backup technology for user data), it’s just that now this functionality has been transferred to a separate Wbadmin command-line utility and is not accessible from the GUI. In this article, we will talk about the features of using the Wbadmin utility to create a backup. Windows image 8.1 and then restore the system from this image.

Backing up the Windows 8.1 image

The operating system image takes up a lot of disk space, so to perform the operation, you must have enough free space (no less than the size of the occupied space on the system disk) on some external disk (for example, USB connection) or network directory.

Open an elevated command prompt and run the following command:

wbAdmin start backup –backupTarget:H: -include:C: -allCritical –quiet

where H:- external drive where the system image is saved

C: - the drive whose image must be forcibly added to the backup being created

AllCritical is a very important parameter, indicating that all critical sections of the system must be included in the backup, i.e. sections containing any system files or components (including hidden boot partition).

Quiet - when executing a command, do not ask the user for confirmation

In the event that it is necessary to include several disk partitions in the backup (for example, C:\, E:\ and F:\), the command will look like this:

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:H: -include:C:,E:,F: -allCritical –quiet

If you want to write the backup to a shared network folder:

wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:\\srv-bak1\BackupFolder -user:username -password:userPassword -include:C: -allCritical -quiet

Note: if authorization is required to access the network folder, please specify the username and password

Depending on the number of disks, the degree of their fullness and the performance of the computer, the process of creating a system image can take several hours (in this example, with 40 GB of information on the C:\ drive, the system backup took about 2 hours).

If, after the backup is created, you open the drive (or network directory) to which it was written in Explorer, you can find on it a familiar one from the days of Windows 7 (function Backup and Restore) WindowsImageBackup directory with several .xml and .vhdx files in it. These are files with system partition images and configuration information.

Advice. In the event that only a few directories or a file need to be restored from the created image, we recommend that you read the article: How to restore individual files from a Windows 8 image
How to restore Windows 8.1 from an image

Next, let's try to figure out how you can restore Windows 8.1 from an image with a backup on an external drive.
Attention: When restoring from a backup, all data on the restored partition will be deleted and replaced with the data contained in the backup.

Boot from boot or installer Windows disk 8.1, connect the external drive to which you previously recorded the backup image of the system.

After starting the installation wizard, click on the Repair your computer link (in the lower left corner)

Then go to Troubleshoot -> Advanced Options -> System Image Recovery

Next, select the OS you want to restore. The system should automatically find the previously created backup copy of the Windows image on the external drive (if this does not happen, you will have to specify it manually).

And finally, by clicking the Finish button, start the process of restoring the system from the image.

System Image Backup in Windows 8.1

Update dated 09/06/2013. After getting acquainted with the recently "leaked" Windows 8.1 RTM (build 9471), we managed to find out that Microsoft decided to return GUI control over the creation of a backup copy of the entire contents of the computer. This function called System Image Backup. To create a full system image in Windows 8.1 (including EFI system partitions, boot, etc.):

Open Control Panel and go to System and Security > File History.
Click the "System Image Backup" button in the lower left corner
Select a drive or network folder on which the system image will be "folded"

Then you need to select the partitions that you want to include in the backup ( system partitions always selected by default).

Click Next, after which the system will start writing its image to an external drive or network directory.