I am creating a Windows Rescue Media for ReDeploy and have a few questions.  My situation is that I'm taking a Windows 10 install on a several year old (source) laptop and redeploying it to a newer (target) laptop.

(1) In the creation of the Rescue Media, it asks what drivers should be included.  Should I thus create the Rescue Media on the Target laptop so the correct drivers are automatically included for it?

(2) In the ReDeploy instructions https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW80/Re-deploying+Windows+to+new+hardware+using+Macrium+ReDeploy , it says the following: "Note: ReDeploy modifies an existing offline operating system to work with new hardware. Restore your system image to the PC being deployed before running ReDeploy. There is no need to reboot your PC after restoring an Image and before you run ReDeploy."

So after creating a system image, I should boot from the Rescue Media on the Target PC, run the Restore wizard to restore that system image onto the Target laptop's drive, and, then, still in the Rescue Media, run the ReDeploy wizard.  Is that correct?

Thanks

For drivers, first of all, understand that ReDeploy only concerns itself with boot-critical drivers, so it's entirely possible that Windows 10 will include the necessary drivers for your new PC.  That might simplify things for you, although it does mean that you'll need to deal with any other drivers after you get into Windows.  If your PC vendor includes an app to help with that, e.g. Dell Update or Lenovo Vantage, that's usually the easiest way to go.  And it might also be appropriate to uninstall drivers/utilities that were only relevant to your old PC.

But if you're not quite that lucky, building Rescue Media on the target PC can help in the way you surmise, but you can also just download appropriate drivers for the new PC and copy them onto your Rescue Media flash drive.  In that case though, you will need to have drivers that can be extracted to raw INF file format.  EXE installers don't work in the Rescue environment, although many PC vendors now provide EXE installers that give you an option to extract their contents rather than installing them.  But if that option isn't available or desirable, then if you need to temporarily install Reflect on the new PC, you'll have to remove your Reflect license on your current PC (under the Help menu), then install it on the new one to be able to create Rescue Media that includes ReDeploy, and THEN remove that license from the temporary Reflect installation on the new PC before you blow away its Windows environment with the image you'll be restoring.

As to your other question, yes that's the correct process.  Restore the image and then run ReDeploy.  No need to reboot beforehand.  You may also need to run Fix Boot Problems, but you can also try just booting your PC first.  If it doesn't work, you can always return to Rescue Media to run that, no need to rerun the restore.

Thanks for the respons

+x

 

jphughan - 13 September 2022 3:15 AM

For drivers, first of all, understand that ReDeploy only concerns itself with boot-critical drivers, so it's entirely possible that Windows 10 will include the necessary drivers for your new PC.  That might simplify things for you, although it does mean that you'll need to deal with any other drivers after you get into Windows.  If your PC vendor includes an app to help with that, e.g. Dell Update or Lenovo Vantage, that's usually the easiest way to go.  And it might also be appropriate to uninstall drivers/utilities that were only relevant to your old PC.

But if you're not quite that lucky, building Rescue Media on the target PC can help in the way you surmise, but you can also just download appropriate drivers for the new PC and copy them onto your Rescue Media flash drive.  In that case though, you will need to have drivers that can be extracted to raw INF file format.  EXE installers don't work in the Rescue environment, although many PC vendors now provide EXE installers that give you an option to extract their contents rather than installing them.  But if that option isn't available or desirable, then if you need to temporarily install Reflect on the new PC, you'll have to remove your Reflect license on your current PC (under the Help menu), then install it on the new one to be able to create Rescue Media that includes ReDeploy, and THEN remove that license from the temporary Reflect installation on the new PC before you blow away its Windows environment with the image you'll be restoring.

As to your other question, yes that's the correct process.  Restore the image and then run ReDeploy.  No need to reboot beforehand.  You may also need to run Fix Boot Problems, but you can also try just booting your PC first.  If it doesn't work, you can always return to Rescue Media to run that, no need to rerun the restore.

Thanks for the response, I did as you suggested but I am running into issues.  At the final step, I'm getting a BSOD with an "Inaccessible Boot Device" error.

First to recap, I made an image of the source laptop through Macrium Reflect.  The Source PC's OS is Windows 10 and it has a M.2 SSD (Samsung Pm871a Mznln256hmhq-000h1).  I also made an image of the Target PC's Windows 11 OS (the stock Windows 11 image that shipped with the laptop from Dell).  The drive in the target PC is an NVMe drive (WDC SN810).

I transferred the Macrium Reflect license to the Target PC to create the Rescue Media and during the Rescue Media creation it detected several drivers and I selected all of them for inclusion.  Unfortunately I did not make note of them but if necessary I can restore the original stock image to the target PC (i.e. Dell's stock WIndows 11 image) to make note of them.  I'm not sure if it's an issue that I'm pulling drivers from a Windows 11 install for use on a Windows 10 PC.  The Rescue Media was created successfully and I booted from it.

While booted from the Rescue Media, I applied the restore to the Target PC and then I applied the ReDeploy.  While configuring the ReDeploy, I noticed that it wasn't detecting any drivers for the Target PC even though I created the Rescue Media on the Target PC.  In particular, it only listed one device (as opposed to several as when the Rescue Media was created on the Target PC) and moreover it wasn't finding a driver for "Intel RST VMD Controller 467F".  Therefore, I mounted/attached the image of the Target PC's Windows 11 OS and added it as a search path and then it found the "Intel RST VMD Controller 467F" driver.  Nevertheless, only this one driver is listed--all of those other drivers that were detected during the Rescue Media creation on the Target PC are not listed.  I'm not sure if this is a problem.

In addition, while configuring the ReDeploy I also selected the "Display boot drivers as they load" and "Enable boot logging" options.  I applied the ReDeploy.

After the PC restarted, it did not display boot drivers as they loaded and I got a BSOD with the error "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE".  I rebooted from the Rescue Media and applied the Fix Boot Problems, but still got the same error.  In addition, on the Target drive I searched for the log file for the boot in \Windows\ntblog.txt (as indicated by the "Enable boot logging" option) but there was no such file created.

Should I try restoring the default Windows 11 installation  that was originally on the Target PC back to the Target PC, recreate the Rescue Media on the Target PC and make note of all of the drivers it detects, and then redo the entire process but manually add all of the detected drivers during the ReDeploy?  Or perhaps I should try a clean Windows 10 installation (as opposed to a Windows 11 install) on the Target PC and recreate the Rescue Media from there instead?  Any help would be appreciated, thanks

An Inaccessible Boot Device BSOD occurs when the system isn't loading the appropriate storage driver for the device where Windows is installed.  And the Rapid Storage Technology driver is a common culprit.  Mounting the Win11 environment was clever, and I'm actually surprised it didn't work.  But if you're only using a single SSD rather than a RAID virtual disk or an Optane setup, then the simplest solution would probably be to just go into the BIOS of your new Dell system and switch it from RST/RAID mode over to AHCI.  The latter causes the system to expose the storage interface directly to the OS rather than abstracting them behind the RST controller, and in that case you don't need any special drivers at all because Windows has had native support for NVMe since Win8.  You may still need to run ReDeploy depending on how the Win10 environment was configured, which would depend on the storage controller configuration of the source system, but you wouldn't need to provide any drivers at that point.  ReDeploy would just configure the OS to use its native NVMe class driver.  Dell's factory default configuration is RST/RAID for reasons relating to history (NVMe on Win7 systems) and consistency (single configuration option that covers all possible storage setups they offer), but if you don't need it, then it's just one more thing to deal with.

When you say that "it only listed one device (as opposed to several when the Rescue Media was created)", I'm not sure where you're looking in either case.  If you're comparing the Rescue Media "Unsupported Devices" list to the Rescue Media Builder's "Devices & drivers" list, then the former only lists devices for which suitable drivers aren't currently loaded, while the latter lists all devices that Rescue Media Builder cares about, even if the WinPE/RE environment you're building has native support for those devices.  If you're looking at something else, screenshots might be helpful, which incidentally can be captured from Rescue by clicking the camera icon you'll find in the taskbar.

+x

 

jphughan - 14 September 2022 3:15 PM

An Inaccessible Boot Device BSOD occurs when the system isn't loading the appropriate storage driver for the device where Windows is installed.  And the Rapid Storage Technology driver is a common culprit.  Mounting the Win11 environment was clever, and I'm actually surprised it didn't work.  But if you're only using a single SSD rather than a RAID virtual disk or an Optane setup, then the simplest solution would probably be to just go into the BIOS of your new Dell system and switch it from RST/RAID mode over to AHCI.  The latter causes the system to expose the storage interface directly to the OS rather than abstracting them behind the RST controller, and in that case you don't need any special drivers at all because Windows has had native support for NVMe since Win8.  You may still need to run ReDeploy depending on how the Win10 environment was configured, which would depend on the storage controller configuration of the source system, but you wouldn't need to provide any drivers at that point.  ReDeploy would just configure the OS to use its native NVMe class driver.  Dell's factory default configuration is RST/RAID for reasons relating to history (NVMe on Win7 systems) and consistency (single configuration option that covers all possible storage setups they offer), but if you don't need it, then it's just one more thing to deal with.

When you say that "it only listed one device (as opposed to several when the Rescue Media was created)", I'm not sure where you're looking in either case.  If you're comparing the Rescue Media "Unsupported Devices" list to the Rescue Media Builder's "Devices & drivers" list, then the former only lists devices for which suitable drivers aren't currently loaded, while the latter lists all devices that Rescue Media Builder cares about, even if the WinPE/RE environment you're building has native support for those devices.  If you're looking at something else, screenshots might be helpful, which incidentally can be captured from Rescue by clicking the camera icon you'll find in the taskbar.

Sorry it took so long to reply.  Just wanted to say thanks and that this fixed the issue, much appreciated

Thanks for reporting back, and glad to hear you’re set!