Thinkpads Forum

I bought a Tablet 2 not long ago, and it came with a Win8 factory install. I did the Win8.1 upgrade, and it's now pretty much configured how I want it to be. At that point I always make a system image of my computers, so they can be restored in case of a failure, without needing to do a fresh install or a factory restore. As the Tablet only has one USB port, which can't even power an external HDD, I'm prevented from using Clonezilla. So I figured I would try the built in Windows image option, and bought a 32Gb USB stick to put the image on. But when I try, I get the message that the "drive is not a valid location for system image". After some reading, I realize that this is a default setting in Windows. Flash drives simply can't be used for this. Which is ok on a regular computer, where you can connect an external hard drive, but on this tablet it creates a problem.

I even tried to connect an externally powered 3.5" USB drive, but no luck. That wasn't even recognized. I even imagined I could burn it on DVDs, but my external DVD writer is of course USB powered too, so that won't work either.

So has anybody had any luck in creating a system image of any kind from a Tablet 2? I guess going through the factory restore isn't the end of the world, but if the SSD fails, I'm out of luck.

Ok, so a little searching brings up this:

I think that MS had a team of attorneys design Windows 7 backup.

In any case, you can break their laws by doing the following,

1. Format your USB stick as NTFS
2. Share your USB stick as a network drive
3. Insure the advanced share allow permissions are set to full control
4. Start Windows Backup and select System Image
5. Select network drive as your backup location
6. Browse to your own computer and select the USB share
7. Enter your computer's logon credentials, if your password is blank use 1 space

Hit OK and you are off and running.

I performed the steps outlined, and the Tablet is right this moment writing the system image onto the USB stick, which is now network location \\thinkpadtablet\d. We'll see how it goes.

I'm not sure how the fact that it's shared will affect being able to restore the image later, or if sharing is simply turned off when I'm done here. Has anyone else tried this trick (Even on other platforms than the Tablet 2) and succeeded in restoring an image created this way?

Ok, I should probably tell how it went.

All attempts I did to copy the image to the USB stick failed. It gave messages like "compression of virtual drive failed" and so on. So I tried one more time with the externally powered 3.5" USB drive, and this time it was recognized. That was accepted as a valid location, so I saved the image file there. That worked out.

There are several other files on the drive too, as I use it for file storage. But I assume you can browse to find the image should you ever need it for restore purposes.