Windows 10 troubleshooting menu does not find system image on USB

@WorldWideIce  If you want to make system image backups, I would strongly recommend using a different solution.  The fact that the Windows system image capability is buried under a section called "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" even in Windows 10 should tell you that Microsoft has no real interest in maintaining that function, and there are several excellent and FREE third-party imaging applications, such as Macrium Reflect.  Even the free version can do a LOT of things that the built-in Windows tool cannot, and the paid version can do even more.  If you use Reflect, it has a tool for creating a bootable "Rescue Media" flash drive that can be used to restore image backups.  The image backups themselves can be stored on that flash drive, or an external hard drive, or a network location.  You don't have to store the bootable application with the backups, so if you want to use a small flash drive to boot your system into the Rescue Media environment while keeping your backups somewhere else, that is completely fine.

But just to give you an idea, here are just SOME of the limitations of the built-in Windows image backup tool:

• You cannot choose to back up only certain partitions on a disk.
• You cannot choose to RESTORE only certain partitions while leaving other existing partitions intact.
• You cannot rearrange partitions as part of a restore operation.
• You cannot resize partitions as part of a restore operation.
• You cannot restore onto a disk that is smaller than the original source, even if the all of the data would fit on the smaller disk.
• You cannot schedule image backups (except for manually creating a Windows scheduled task by specifying an appropriate a command-line command)
• You cannot use compression for image backups
• You cannot encrypt image backups
• You cannot create Differential/Incremental backups or specify a retention policy.

It's really not a very good solution.  Macrium Reflect can do all of the things I listed above, in fact even the FREE version can do everything I mentioned above except Incremental backups and encryption.

Thank you for your advice. I finally succeeded to restore my laptop by accessing the Windows 10 System Image on my local network, stored on my NAS.

I never succeeded to use the USB key. It is unfortunate because it looked to be like the simplest solution. I will most probably never know why it is not working

UPDATE: as a follow-up on this topic, technical support confirmed to me that "The restore image media should not be more than 64Gb." and they propose to "splitting the 128Gig drive in to two partitions of 64GB".

In case it helps someone else.