Windows 10 Boot Options don't show Windows Image Recovery/Advanced Options

Question

I'm trying to move my complete Windows installation (Win 10 Edu x64) including all files and apps to a new SSD. To this end, I created a complete Windows image on an external USB drive, swapped my old SSD against the new one, and now want to recover/copy the image to the new SSD.

Since I don't have a DVD drive, I couldn't easily burn a Windows recovery disk and instead installed a new Win 10 Pro 64x on the new, empty SSD. I then used Win 10 advanced boot options to access the special boot menu from which you can typically recover Windows images.

I successfully tested that with my old SSD. When clicking "Troubleshoot", there is an "Advanced options" button, which again includes the "WindowsImageRecovery":

Unfortunately, this doesn't show up, when trying to do the same on the freshly installed Win 10 Pro on the new, otherwise empty SSD. When clicking "Troubleshoot" it doesn't show any advanced options and no WindowsImageRecovery:

Why is it like this? How can I still recover my Windows image? I don't want to manually reinstall all apps and copy all files.

Answer 1

I still don't know why the option didn't show, but I think either way it would not have helped to use the Image Recovery from the Windows installed on the new SSD because that would not allow me to delete and restore all partitions from the old SDD (stored in the Windows image).

I ended up solving the problem by simply borrowing a USB DVD-drive, burning the Windows repair disk, and using that to perform the Windows image recovery - which worked absolutely fine.

Finally, I had to adjust the partitions of the restored Windows on the new SSD to make use of the extended SSD space. Unfortunately, Windows placed a recovery partition in between my old, small C: partition and the new unallocated space such that I could not directly extend the existing C: partition but first had to delete the recovery partition. This can easily be done using diskpart (step 3).