By AOMEI / Last Updated June 24, 2021

Restore Hard Drive in Bare Metal

What if one day that your system has been wiped out completely and accidentally? Even if you’ve backed up the system earlier, however, without an executable Windows OS environment there’s no way to restore the system. Most of the time, people can only restore the system under Windows PE. Windows Preinstallation Environment is a lightweight version of Windows in which we can perform some basic and primitive tasks. Today, we’ll introduce you a WinPE tool and show you how to restore hard drive in bare metal with this tool.

AOMEI PE Builder

We can use AOMEI PE Builder to create bootable media of Windows PE. And it’s not just normal WinPE, it’s the one comes with two of AOMEI Tech’s disk management utilities----AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant.

The process of restoring hard drive in AOMEI PE Builder on bare metal is: back up system partition as well as system reserved partition in AOMEI Backupper first, then launch AOMEI PE Builder to get a WinPE bootable device. Use this bootable device to access into WinPE. Open AOMEI Backupper on the desk top.

Steps of Restoring the System

1. First we need to back up system in AOMEI Backupper. In the main window, click on Backup on the left. Then choose system backup.

2. Specify a location for saving the system image. It can be the local hard drive, external USB drive, CD/DVD or NAS.

3. In the advanced settings, we can select the compression level of the backup image, enable VSS, split the backup image file etc.

4. Click Start button. When the process is completed, we can find the image file in the destination storage device.

5. Download and open AOMEI PE Builder, choose a device as the bootable device: CD/DVD, USB drive. then we can get a bootable of WinPE in which AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant both included.

6. Once the system has been damaged, access into Windows PE via booting from the prepared bootable device.

7. On the desktop, open AOMEI Backupper. Choose Restore, then follow the wizard to complete system restoration.