TeraByte Unlimited

I recently bought the Image for Windows and Boot it suite and have successfully made an image of my Windows 11 drive. After building a Win RE boot device on USB I decided to test it to make sure that all drives were seen by the IFW software. My external backup and IFW RE drives are connected by USB and the main Windows drive is internal and is NVME
The system boots from the device successfully but after starting IFW the only drive seen is the Windows drive. If I launch a command prompt I can then access all three drives by using a directory command.
I did not add any storage device drivers to the boot disk, but the fact that I can see all drives from a command prompt would suggest the problem lies elsewhere. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction?

in simple operations, restore / validate will show the backups and then automatically choose same for restore. To select a different target, use the manually select checkbox and it will ask for the target (physical) drives to restore to. Backup will show the drives as well.

You could try the Linx version of the recovery media, it usually detects everything and gives you everything needed to restore partitions/drives.

If "Secure Boot" is enabled in the BIOS settings then no external drives are available or seen whether in BIOS or a WinPE environment which is the purpose intended when using "Secure Boot".

When I disable "Secure Boot" all external drives are seen. To check if "Secure Boot" is enabled in your BIOS
plug in an external drive and boot into BIOS settings and check under the BOOT Tab whether your External drive shows up in the "Boot Order" if not disable "Secure Boot" then reboot back into BIOS after which you should see your External Drive then after that all drives should also be seen and available.

Strange, I've always been able to see USB external HDs when using a WinPE. Secure boot enabled.

There was an issue with external USB drives that was corrected with KB5070773...

viewtopic.php?t=4941

OldNavyGuy wrote: Mon Jan 26, 2026 5:09 pm There was an issue with external USB drives that was corrected with KB5066835...

viewtopic.php?t=4941

OldNavyGuy: According to your own post in the link, the issue was caused by KB5066835 and subsequently fixed by KB5070773

OldNavyGuy wrote: Tue Oct 28, 2025 7:09 pm If you are using Windows 11 24H2 or 25H2, and have applied the October 2025 Patch Tuesday Updates (KB5066835), the WinRE environment will no longer recognize USB devices.

I found that this issue also affects TBWinRE.

I discovered that today after making new boot media for 4.08.

Microsoft issued an out-of band patch KB5070773, which corrects it.

I'm posting this to (hopefully) avoid confusion.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to provide some advice and experience.
I have now managed to prove that the backup will work on my system after locating a problem with a driver and a small change to the setup procedure I have been using.
I have been using a Western digital 1TB mechanical hard drive with a SATA interface as the backup device. I am then interfacing this to a USB port with a Startech USB to SATA adapter. This adapter is quite a fast interface but requires a SCSI driver which is included with Windows 11 called UASPSTOR.SYS. I did wonder if this driver had not been loaded properly during the USB disk building process, but later proved that it was.
During the backup process I had the backup drive and the USB pen drive (the boot disk) connected to USB ports. After restarting to boot from the pen drive was when the back up drive was not visible to IFW, I then decided to unplug the backup drive and re-insert. The drive then appeared!
I only wished I had thought of that sooner but put it down to experience. The other feature which confused me was the GUI on the restore application in IFW. It does not seem to work for me as Terabyte support suggests in that, in simple mode the GUI will show the backup first. On my system it is the Windows drive alone which is shown and I have to set manual operation to select the backup drive. Its all part of the learning curve but I now think I can be confident that it should work as a restore if I should need it.

In simple operations, restore will list all backups done in simple mode. Select the file to restore, then it will auto find the target to restore to, should you want to manually select the target drive, tick the box that says to manually select after picking what to restore.

Muad'Dib wrote: Tue Jan 27, 2026 1:14 am OldNavyGuy: According to your own post in the link, the issue was caused by KB5066835 and subsequently fixed by KB5070773

Corrected.

Thanks.