System Image Restore Error 0x80070057

Question

I have run into this error (0x80070057) while trying to recover my hard drive after a (different) blue screen error. The message is that the "parameter is incorrect" (paraphrasing as I don't have it in front of me, but the hex error code above is correct).

Is there any way to get information on what parameter is wrong, what the correct value of the parameter is, and what the current value of the parameter is? This is unfortunately a very unhelpful error message and I don't see any log output.

How we got here:

1. I rebooted my computer and got a blue screen on startup. I tried to repair the start up and perform a normal system restore first (using both the built-in recovery and my original Windows 10 installation disk). None of that worked. I got some errors here but I don't remember what they were and (for reasons below) are irrelevant.
2. I have been making system images of my C drive to my E drive since my C drive was smaller SSD and my E drive is a 2 TB hard drive. I attempted to perform the system image restore. I got this error that the parameter is incorrect. It may have been a different one. I wasn't keeping exact track.
3. At this point I had given up and decided to reinstall Windows 10. I figured I might fix something and make the system image restore work.
4. After reinstalling I tried system image restore again. I got the 0x80070057 error.

That's pretty much all of the info. A few minor things that I KNOW I did that MIGHT be the problem are messing with the boot order (also known as BIOS order maybe) of the hard drives. I know because on one of the errors it mentioned something about the disk not being big enough. I made the C drive I used to use first and got the same 0x80070057 error again. I AM NOT CERTAIN IF THE ORDER OF THE REST KF THE DISKS IS THE SAME OR IF IT MATTERS. The image was ONLY of the C drive and it was first then and now.

Somethings that I can mostly confidently eliminate as the problem are UEFI versus BIOS. My motherboard is extremely old, from before 2010. It is the Asus Rampage 3 Extreme. It does not have UEFI and only a "real" BIOS. It does not have any emulated BIOS options to my knowledge.

Answer 1

Hello Jackson,

I understand you are facing issue with hex code 0x80070057. Kindly share the below details for the further support.

• Make and Model of PC
• When did the issue start happening?

-Did you make any hardware/software changes to the PC?

Thank you,

Manjunath

Answer 2

1. This is a PC I built myself so there is no male or model. Some relevant info is that the motherboard is the Asus Rampage III Extreme (link below) and the CPU is an Intel i7 930 (I believe, not sure off the top of my head, but it is an Intel 64 bit CPU and very old).
2. The issue began on something like Jan 7th or 8th and the backup I'm trying to use is from Jan 5th a few days before.
3. I have made some changes to the boot order of drives in my BIOS to be able to boot from my recovery disk and installation disk. This is outlined in the first post. https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/rampage%20iii%20extreme/helpdesk_knowledge/

Answer 3

Any suggestions?

Answer 4

I've found something that might be helpful. I'm leaving this link for future folks. I intend to give more details but may forget. I feel it is better to help lead others to a potentially correct solution than to forget to explain what worked.

https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/0x80070057-error-at-the-end-of-system-image-restore.17023/post-131837

And in case the link dies here is an archived one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230124182012/https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/0x80070057-error-at-the-end-of-system-image-restore.17023/

The user in the link seems to be having BIOS/UEFI problems. Again, I am not (as far as I know) because my computer only has BIOS. I was able to make Macrium images from mounting the VHDX files from the Windows system image.

Answer 5

I got my stuff back! The below worked but I will give more details. There are a few steps I didn't get perfect notes of so they may be slightly inaccurate.

https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/0x80070057-error-at-the-end-of-system-image-restore.17023/post-131837

And in case the link dies here is an archived one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230124182012/https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/0x80070057-error-at-the-end-of-system-image-restore.17023/

Download Macrium Free edition and create a rescue disk (or USB using Rufus). Unfortunately I couldn't figure this out using Windows alone. HOWEVER! If you want to reinstall Windows you can and use step 3 below to manually recover files you want.

Boot from the Macrium rescue disk.

Locate your system image. Inside there are VHDX files. These are the same types of files virtual machines use. Because of this we can mount them as if they were real disks and then have Macrium image them. The tricky part is that there is one VHDX file per partition. I ended up only needing the main C drive and not the system reserved ones but go ahead and do this for all of them

Open a command prompt. Use diskpart to mount the VHDX files. This should look something like below, once for each file

select vdisk file="F:\WindowsImageBackup\ComputerName\Backup 2023-01-05 042027\72fbe593-0000-0000-0000-100000000000.vhdx"
attach vdisk

Using steps described here (archived here) to prep your hard drive for restore. This is important if you're like me and have an old motherboard that doesn't have UEFI so you have to use MBR to boot. The VHDX files are GPT and if you directly restore them then they won't work because it will make the disk into a GPT one. Open up diskpart again and run the below commands.

list disk
select disk 0
// DANGER! Make sure you select the right disk there. You'll lose data if you don't.
clean
convert mbr
create par pri size=300
format fs=NTFS quick
active
exit

Okay, so now you've got an MBR harddrive with what will become the system reserved partition. I did not need to restore my "actual" system reserved partitions. The new one was fine. Restore the Macrium image to this drive. You can click and drag it from the GUI when restoring. There may be an odd "free space" thing in the image from the VHDX file but ignore it. I think it is some odd artifact of Window's system imaging process. Then restore!

Once done with that, as the article from Macrium says you'll need to use Macrium's "fix boot problems". You can do it right there without rebooting. Select that little partition you manually made as the "active" partition as it describes.

Then you *should* be good.

I hope this helps folks who have this problem. It is utterly insane to me that a Windows backup taken from MBR disks could not be restored to MBR disks using Windows's own tools. It's shattered my trust in Windows's backup process to be honest. All it would ever tell me was "invalid parameter." Totally unacceptable.

Most importantly I'd like to thank rutra80 for following through and posting the solution to their problem when they solved it themselves. They could have just said "Nevermind, I figured it out" but they didn't. I hope we can all be more like rutra80. <3