Windows will not load after ImageX

One thing I do a lot is image a computer and restore that image using Microsoft's ImageX utility.  Imaging a disk is one of the fastest ways to backup a computer.  But about 1 in 4 times that I restore an image the computer will not boot afterwards.  I never knew why it worked most of the time, but had a high rate of failure.  What's more, it made me very hesitant to use this in critical situations.  What if I backup a computer knowing I will need to restore the image, and that image restoration fails?  You'd never put your money in a bank that has a 1 in 4 chances they will lose your money, right?  Fortunately, I recently found out what the problem is, and more importantly, how to fix it.

First let me describe the symptoms.  After performing a restore from a WIM file using ImageX, you reboot your computer.  But instead of Windows loading you get an error screen saying:

Status: 0xc000000e
Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

The problem here is the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) info.  Windows stores the boot information in a BCD file and for whatever reason the BCD from the image file is not compatible with the new system after restoring the image.

To correct this problem you need to first boot your computer from a WinPE CD or USB drive.  I won't explain that as there are lots of guides on the Internet.  Once WinPE is loaded, if you type "bcdedit.exe" you will see the problem.  Three of the fields are "unknown."

The following 3 commands will restore these unknown values and fix the problem

bcdedit.exe /set {default} device partition=c:
bcdedit.exe /set {default} osdevice partition=c:
bcdedit.exe /set {bootmgr} device partition=c:

After this, simply reboot and Windows should load normally!