Has Anyone imaged their C drive/ PC with Bitdefender running on it?

DronePilot

For security reasons I want to make an image of my C drive. If something happens to the C drive i can just slam the imaged drive into the enclosure and remove the no bootable drive. I do backups regularly of the data.

Every time I image, no matter what software i use when i test boot the image it starts to load, then inaccessible boot device.

Then i thought BD may be doing this to keep someone from imaging multiple desktops from one image all with BD on them

Alexandru_BD

Hello,

I think that's a good security practice, prevention. Generally speaking, when the error you mentioned pops up, this usually has to do with Windows-level issues, so not technically related to the security solution. Because Bitdefender doesn't intentionally block disk imaging or booting cloned drives, it doesn’t have an anti-imaging mechanism that would cause that error.

However, the antivirus software licensing flow might detect that the hardware changed and require reactivation after restoring or cloning a system image.. but that's only a supposition at this stage, this is a very specific scenario, one that I haven't encountered so far, thus I'm not really in the know here… But I think there are a few avenues to explore in order to find the root cause. First, If you are seeing the 'inaccessible boot device error' right after imaging, so before Windows even loads enough to initialize Bitdefender, this most likely indicates the problem is at the Windows driver or bootloader level, not the antivirus.

Secondly, I think you can look at the following steps before or after imaging:

Check BIOS/UEFI SATA mode. Make sure the source and target systems use the same controller mode (usually AHCI). A mismatch, for example RAID on one, AHCI on another, will likely trigger that error.

Then, inject storage drivers into the Image. Before imaging, open Device Manager → IDE/ATA/Storage Controllers and note the drivers. Ensure your imaging tool (Macrium Reflect, Acronis, etc.) includes those drivers when restoring.

If you are using Macrium Reflect or Acronis, use Fix Boot Problems. Most imaging tools include a recovery environment option that can rebuild the bootloader.

Sysprep before imaging (optional). If the goal is to make a reusable image for multiple machines, run:
sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown

Then image the drive. This basically resets hardware-specific bindings, like storage, network, and drivers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that BitLocker or Secure Boot mismatches can also cause boot issues on restored drives, so disable BitLocker, if used.
Finally, keep imaging with Bitdefender installed, there's no need to uninstall the antivirus in this case.

I hope this helps, I can't guarantee that the steps will fix the issue, but it's worth trying these, if nothing else worked.

Regards