I have created a Macrium image of a Windows 10 system using Macrium 7.3.5672.  The source system is UEFI with a GPT disk.

I then followed the instructions as per Knowledge base article and restored the image to the same system, but after the restore the volumes created by Macrium are offline.

After the restore the disk volumes are marked as offline and can not be made online irrespective of what commands are used in diskpart.  For some reason the restored partitions have the type set to read-only which can not be cleared.

DISKPART> list vol
Volume ###  Ltr  Label         Fs      Type                Size      Status       Info
Volume 0       F   Rescue     UDF    DVD-ROM      601 MB  Healthy
Volume 1       E                                Partition         500  MB Healthy    Offline
Volume 2       C                                Partition           75 GB  Healthy    Offline
Volume 3       D  STORE      NTFS  Partition           79 GB  Healthy
DISKPART> sel vol 2
Volume 2 is the selected volume.
DISKPART> online volume
Diskpart could non online the selected volume.
DISKPART> detail volume
Disk ###      Status                    Size             Free           Dyn    Gpt
* Disk 0        Online                         92 GB          16 GB
Read-only                     : Yes
Hidden                          : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy               : No
Offline                           : Yes
BitLocked Encrypted    : No
Installable                     : Yes

DISKPART>  attributes volume clear readonly
DiskPart has encountered an error: Incorrect function.

I would suggest trying to remove the readonly first: Select disk 0 first then, clear readonly

DISKPART> select disk 0

DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly

Then you can try the online again.  You need to do that twice - once for each of the two volumes that are offline.  Select each volume before doing the online.

DISKPART>Select volume 1
DISKPART> online volume

+x

 

Drac144 - 10 March 2021 8:24 PM

I would suggest trying to remove the readonly first: Select disk 0 first then, clear readonly

DISKPART> select disk 0

DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly

Then you can try the online again.  You need to do that twice - once for each of the two volumes that are offline.  Select each volume before doing the online.

DISKPART>Select volume 1
DISKPART> online volume

Thank for the reply, but the command you provided select disk 0 & attributes disk clear readonly is applicable to the disk and the disk is online and writeable, it is the partitions which are online and readonly and can not be forced to be otherwise. In the initial post you will see that I have already attempted to apply the command "attributes partition clear readonly" to each of the volumes which fails. 

I suspect that Macrium is setting some attributes in the partition when restoring a GPT partition to a MBR disk which diskpart and windows does not understand, so the partition is offline and as indicated earlier can not be forced online.

I'm intrigued by this one.  I remember an issue a while ago where if you restored an MBR partition onto an existing GPT disk, the partition marked as active in the source wouldn't get marked as active on the restored target, and Macrium fixed that, but I haven't seen a report of this.  Then again, switching partition layouts isn't all that common, and going from GPT back to MBR is less common even among those scenarios.

Can you post screenshots from Reflect showing your the partition layout from the GPT disk in your source image as well as the partition layout of your restored MBR disk?  The output of "list vol" doesn't clarify that, in fact it doesn't even identify which disks each volume lives on.  The Rescue Media interface has a camera button in the taskbar that can be used to capture screenshots.

Yes the problem is "Interesting" in that the partitions on the source disk are perfectly fine and can be restored to a GPT disk without any problems.

It is after the restoration to a MBR drive, that the interesting issues arise.  It is not missing data in the original transcript regarding the restored partitions, as you will see in the screenshots below any GPT partition which is restored to a MBR drive will become this zombie type partition.  It will not have a type, will be readonly  and also offline.

I have included a large number of images below which detail all of the various steps.

Image 00 - GPT partitions from the source Windows Machine.


Image 10 - Creating the MBR disk on the destination machine as per Forum post (identical hardware just switched to BIOS mode rather than UEFI)

Image 11 - Displaying MBR Drive details in diskpart, you can see the destination MBR drive looks perfectly normal at this point in time.



Image 12 - Macrium Restore - selecting the destination MBR drive


Image 12B - Macrium Restore - dragging Windows partition from image to MBR drive



Image 13 - Macrium Restore - Checking the restore partition details on MBR destination drive



Image 14 - Macrium Restore - Restore summary to MBR drive



Image 15 - Macrium Restore - Restore progress to MBR drive



Image 16 - Macrium Restore - Restore now complete to MBR drive


After the restore is complete, I reboot Macrium recovery disk and then check the recovered disk and partition information on the MBR drive.

*** Now the interesting part, with the messed up partition on the MBR drive

Image 17 - Restore partition to MBR drive  - showing zombie offline partition.


Image 18 - Restore partition to MBR drive - diskpart disk details screen



Image 19 - Restore partition to MBR drive - diskpart attempt to make partition online or not readonly fails

Thanks for the screenshots.  There certainly doesn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary about your setup.  The Windows partition is small, and you're only trying to restore that single partition.  I don't have VMware, but I'll see if I can replicate this in a Hyper-V environment I have.  The only thing that does seem a bit out of the ordinary is the partition layout of your original GPT disk.  A default UEFI Windows installation has an FAT32 EFI partition of 100 MB, an Unformatted MSR partition of 16 MB (used to be 128 MB), and then the NTFS Windows partition and an NTFS Windows Recovery partition of 500-800 MB or so.  That's quite different from what you have.  I admit I doubt that would make a difference in this scenario you're discussing, but that does look a bit curious to me.  Did VMware set up that partition layout in the background when you provided the Windows ISO while setting up the virtual machine rather than taking you through the full Windows Setup process?  If so, I guess it might have laid down that layout.

One thing I've just noticed.  The KB article specifies that the manually created partition is supposed to be marked as Active.  You aren't doing that when prepping it, and instead you're marking the restored Windows partition as active after the restore.  If that's the setup you intend, then you don't need to bother with the initial partition in the first place.  The reason a separate partition is typically used as the active partition is to allow setups like enabling BitLocker on the Windows partition.  That doesn't work if you don't have another partition you can boot from in order to unlock the BitLocker volume.

But I just tried these steps in a Hyper-V VM where I restored the Windows partition from a GPT disk onto a manually prepped MBR disk.  I even skipped the step of marking the manually created partition as Active just in case that mattered somehow.  But after Reflect did its work, I opened Diskpart and ran "list vol", and everything showed up as normal.

+x

 

sidneyduffy - 10 March 2021 5:50 PM

I have created a Macrium image of a Windows 10 system using Macrium 7.3.5672.  The source system is UEFI with a GPT disk.

I then followed the instructions as per Knowledge base article and restored the image to the same system, but after the restore the volumes created by Macrium are offline.

After the restore the disk volumes are marked as offline and can not be made online irrespective of what commands are used in diskpart.  For some reason the restored partitions have the type set to read-only which can not be cleared.

DISKPART> list vol
Volume ###  Ltr  Label         Fs      Type                Size      Status       Info
Volume 0       F   Rescue     UDF    DVD-ROM      601 MB  Healthy
Volume 1       E                                Partition         500  MB Healthy    Offline
Volume 2       C                                Partition           75 GB  Healthy    Offline
Volume 3       D  STORE      NTFS  Partition           79 GB  Healthy
DISKPART> sel vol 2
Volume 2 is the selected volume.
DISKPART> online volume
Diskpart could non online the selected volume.
DISKPART> detail volume
Disk ###      Status                    Size             Free           Dyn    Gpt
* Disk 0        Online                         92 GB          16 GB
Read-only                     : Yes
Hidden                          : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy               : No
Offline                           : Yes
BitLocked Encrypted    : No
Installable                     : Yes

DISKPART>  attributes volume clear readonly
DiskPart has encountered an error: Incorrect function.

Hi

Thanks for posting. Is the MBR disk an SSD?  If so, its 'over provisioned' space maybe depleted and it may have entered into a locked, read only state.

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000022714/memory-and-storage.html

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

See our reviews on

@sidneyduffy  In addition to my last post, we have seen this exact situation a couple of times before, and on both occasions it was caused by SSD failure. 

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

See our reviews on

Rather than off the shelf suggestions we need to understand why Macrium is broken, while I may be a new member here I have worked with computers since 1984... So lets cover some of the above items, plus some additional ones:::

1. The SSD is fine, this is a proverbial "read herring".  The reasons why I say the SD is fine is a) it is NEW b) I always check my hardware first and s)  if I restore as a GPT drive then it works. So given that it is extremely unlikely (or let me say impossible) to be the SSD.

2. It does not matter if I make the first MSR partition active or not, when preparing the MBR disk.  To prove this, I replicated the procedure including making the MSR active before restore - it makes no difference the partitions come back as offline.

Some additional data points from a few more hours of trying to solve this issue:

3. When running Macrium restore, then trying to restore any of the partitions from the image from a GPT disk results in an offline partition.  I tried to restore the NTFS data partition after doing the setup MBR disk including setting active and interestingly this works and the partition is visible as NTFS and is online.

4. When I tried to restore any of the system volumes such as the NTFS Windows Partition, then these would be offline after restore, I even made sure the verify image was enabled.

5. When I tried to restore any of the system volumes such as the NTFS Windows Partition, this time with setting the checkbox "Enable rapid data restore" to off, then these would be offline after restore, I even made sure the verify image was enabled.

6. So the problems seems to be around restoring an OS based GPT partition. To validate this, I creates a blank  source systems with a new GPT disk and three volumes volumes: MSR (500MB), FAT32 (256MB), & NTFS all partitions were empty, then do a Macrium Image and then a restore. I could restore any one of these partitions in any orders with or without the first partition on the MBR drive being present or active.

I used diskpart and a program Paragon HDM to compare the disk and partition information on the blank system and the Window10 system, the only difference other than the partitions containing data and the Windows 10 OS was that the some of the flags are set on the Windows disk such as
Boot Disk : Yes
Pagefile Disk : Yes

I will now install a new copy of Window 10 20H2 on the blank system and do a Macrium Image and Restore using that, but one still must ask the question why Macrium fails to restore a partition