Solved System Image Backup in vhdx format on external not working

[Mintyyf]

I basically put everything on my laptop to clean out my external drives than made a system image using the windows 8.1 tool thats in the control panel. I had it saved in an external drive and figured all was well in the world. About a week later when I plugged in a usb (which I was just trying to check what was on it) made my entire system crash and I had to reinstall windows and lost everything.

Anyways I figured I still had the system image, which meant there was some hope. But everytime I try to restart and go into the recover from system image option it can't find the image, and than I try browsing to install the driver so it can find it on my external, but it always says it needs to reboot to install the driver so that doesn't seem to be an option. I finally gave up on trying to get a system image open from that and tried some 3rd party software. Acronis to be specific... now that only recognizes VHD and not vhdx..

And yes I made sure my external had no other files on it. I also made sure the pc names and users etc were the same as before. Anyways I came to the point where I figured I should just mount the images so I can view individual files and than just copy them. But with a mounted image its not showing anything, even though the entire thing takes up 60GB. (Which brings me to another question, isn't 60GB awfully small for a backup? Am I panicking for no reason, I read with a few places VHDX makes a dynamic system image of 60gb.. making it seem as if it was normal. But with 600gb of info on my harddrive that hardly seems accurate).

I think I may be in over my head and doing this all wrong, or I should just consider this a fail and start balling my eyes out because I lost everything. I legit just took everything off my external with all my files to format it, reorganize it and put it back on, and in between all that is when this crash happened.. So I essentially lost everything. I'm just at a loss, any input at this point would be so helpful. Thank you!

 

[topgundcp]

After you mounted the image, did you assign a letter to it ?

 

[Mintyyf]

I had it working before, but now everytime I try to add a letter to it I'm asked to format.. Am I doing it wrong?

 

[topgundcp]

When you use built in Windows backup. It creates more than one .vhdx files for each partition such as recovery, C: partition ...
the .vhdx file for C: drive will be the largest one in size. Make sure you select it to Attach. If you selected the right one and it still asks you to format then the .vhdx file is probably corrupted. Google search on "How to fix a corrupted vdhx file" then you have quite a few answers including a third party software such as: VHD Recovery Tool to Extract VHD Files from Corrupt & Damaged virtual hard disk

 

[Mintyyf]

Apparently it was corrupted, I found a program that could open it regardless so I was able to get everything back. Thank you for your help though! Much appreciated, hope you both have a wonderful day!

For anyone else experiencing this same problem with a vhdx not mounting right due to whatever issue, corruption or anything else, I highly recommend eassos partitionguru. I didn't bother to fix the image to actually use it, but at the very least I was able to get to my files to copy them. Best of luck!

 

[topgundcp]

You are welcome and thanks for reporting back. Your solution will help others with same problem.
BTW, For system image backup, I highly recommend: Macrium Reflect Free. It is very easy to use and very reliable