Client restore off of WSE2012 doesn't work

[RobbieH]

I'm at a loss here. The problem with me is I like to find the root cause of my issues. I know I could probably boot off my W7 disk and do a repair, but I want to know why my restore isn't working on its own. I've done this from WHS 1 and 2 with no issues before, don't know what is wrong this time.

 

Scenario:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64, i3 processor, SSD boot drive.

Machine has been acting funny as if something were wrong with the drive, so I took it out, erased it, ran a full surface test, etc. Did not find any issues, but it's not the first time I've seen an SSD be finicky. 

 

Create recovery thumb drive from WSE 2012. Boot from thumb drive, run full recovery, recovery succeeds every time. Reboot, and I get "Missing bootldr". 

 

I did my searches as best I could on Google, but I can't find anyone with a similar issue. Since a lot of us here run WSE or WHS, I was hoping someone had some experience with this. I don't want to run recovery until I know what happened.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Running the repair on the install disk is the best idea.

 

If you're doing a recovery and wiping the drive..... I highly recommend that you start the installation process, and THEN restore. This makes sure that all of the system partitions are created properly.

[RobbieH]

Repair did fix the issue.

 

Not sure what you mean by run an install then restore. I just put the wiped drive in, boot off USB, then tell it to restore the entire C physical disk, as in I don't select individual partitions.

 

Pretty strange that this happened, I've never had it fail before. But, it's fixed. It is the only working WMC computer I have right now - the W7 VM won't switch to Rovi so the guide is blank and the recordings won't work, and the PC I'm typing on now won't finish the PlayReady setup. At least this PC I'm on now isn't all that important, I don't mind wiping WMC off of it and starting from scratch.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

by "install then restore", I mean start a Windows installation (clean), and once it reboots, start the restore process.

 

The reason I recommend this, is that in some cases, the restore process doesn't get the system configuration right and causes it to be unbootable.  Running the installation rebuilds the boot files.  

 

But running the startup repair option does that as well.  However, on a new drive... the above may be mandatory, as it may not start the restore process properly.