Win 10 System Image Restore failed - RPC server unavailable

[Guest Loddonlily]

I lent a Windows 10 (32 bit) machine to a friend recently and took a System Image Backup first - so I could put it back exactly how it was when I sent it off, and not be troubled by anything he might install on it! The backup seemed to work fine.

 

So now I've got the machine back and want to restore. I couldn't immediately find my Recovery DVD so I made a brand new one off the machine itself, then booted off that Recovery disk, and selected System Image Recovery, with the external backup drive connected. The tool correctly found the backup system image, so I told it to go ahead and restore.

 

After not very long I get back: "The system image restore failed. Error details: The RPC server is unavailable. (0x800706BA)"

 

I've tried this numerous times, including turning off and on and rebooting the Recovery DVD, and get the same result. To add major insult to injury, it seems that the recovery process got as far as wiping the hard drive before it decided that it couldn't proceed with the restore: the command prompt tells me that C: and D: exist but are empty.

 

The command prompt option reports the Windows version as 10.0.17134.112

 

Anything I can find on the web about "the RPC server is unavailable" (and there's a LOT) is pointing me at fixing stuff in my installation, which of course I haven't got any more - I'm just running the recovery environment.

 

Any ideas? Or is this PC now just totally bricked?

 

(Incidentally - I don't even have installation disks to do a clean install as this Windows 10 installation was done during the free upgrade period...)

 

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