System Image restore crashes consistently while trying to access external media

Question

I am trying to restore a System Image from an external drive to the only disk drive mounted in a brand new MacPro. Whenever I try to launch the System Image Restore, I get a crash in BMRUI with an access violation (instruction at address 0xff0db494 referenced memory at 0x00000000). Any idea how I could get the System Image Restore to work?

The crash happens after I click Next in the first restore dialog, while the Scanning for system image disk message is displayed. My external drive has two partitions on it:

1. A 200MB EFI System Partition.
2. A 1397GB NTFS Data Partition.

Answer 1

The EFI System Partition on the backup disk was somehow confusing Windows 7 and causing it to crash. I had to remove the EFI System Partition (basically I wiped the backup disk) and create a new backup, then move to the new machine, and restore again. The System Image restore no longer crashed once I was asking it to read the system image from an attached disk with only one partition.

To get rid of the EFI System Partition, the easiest is to use the diskpart program:

1. Launch an elevated CMD (open the Windows menu, type CMD and press Shift-Ctrl-RETURN).
2. Type diskpart
3. Type list disk and find which disk is the one you need to wipe clean.
4. Type select disk nnn where nnn is the disk number.
5. Make sure it is the right disk by doing a list partition and check that it has an EFI System Partition on it.
6. Type clean. This will wipe the whole disk -- all your data will be lost.

Answer 2

I had the same problem on Windows Server 2008 R2. Apparently a bug in bmrui.exe. For me it worked when I assigned a drive letter to the backup volume. I didn't have one assigned before since it wasn't needed by the backup application.