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W_Whelan
I am trying to help a friend fix his PC purchased new several years ago. It’s an "all-in-one" HP TouchSmart model 610-1130Y. It came w/Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bits and Office installed.
It came w/o installation media or recovery disk. I set him up with a backup pocket USB HDD drive (i.e. for doing Win7 "Backup/Restore"). It has been doing daily backups.
Subsequently he migrated to Windows10 64-bit, which I learned after the 30-day reversion time for his PC back to Win7 expired. He also doesn't have a Win10 recovery disk. His USB backup drive IS backing up in Win10 as it was in Win7 (His most recent BU is 5/23/18).
Recently he experienced a power glitch. Now the system no longer boots. He gets the error message: Bootmgr is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart when he tries to boot.
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I have been all over Microsoft's user websites and tried the various suggestions for the “Bootmg is missing” problem. That is... get into the WinRE from a Win10 install DVD (i.e. which I downloaded) and attempt recovery from there. I've tried everything possible in the WinRE, including invoking the various bootrec / commands in the command line mode. All the bootrec commands say they "complete successfully" but the system still won't boot.
When I attempt to do a "Restore" from his backup HDD from WinRE, it fails with this message:
Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using BIOS and this computer is using EFI. Is this due to the migration from Win7->Win10 ???
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Question #1: If nothing more can be done to enable a Restore from his backup HDD and new install of Win10 is required, will he then be able to use his backup drive with a new Win10 installation to do a system image Restore? If not he basically loses Win7/Win10 activation code(s) and more preciously- all his data/as well as the Office Application programs.
Question #2: If he’s able to get a Win7 recovery disk from HP (i.e. presumably tied to his MS Windows7 activation code) and he reinstalls Win7 then migrates to Win10 from Win7, will he likely be able to do a system Restore from his backup drive??
TIA
Wjw
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