I have just spend the better part of a day trying to do something seemingly very simple - to restore a System Image I made of my Windows 8.1 system. In the end I finally managed to get the system restored, but it was not without more pain than I can bare at this advanced stage of my life.

A couple of things complicate the restore, so let me give a brief history of what led up to this.

1. I built a system based on a modern Asus Z97M-Plus motherboard (UEFI), with an Adaptec RAID 6405 card with two 1TB WD Caviar Black SATA drives in RAID1.
2. Windows 8.1 Pro was installed and configured (this was installed under UEFI mode).
3. The RAID card behaved badly, so I had to remove it, and try a single 1TB drive connected to the motherboard's SATA port. It is from this configuration that I made a System Image. Take note that I did not reinstall the OS - the disk worked as is.
4. I then played with onboard RAID and reinstalled the OS.
5. At this point I wanted to restore the backup I made to a single 1TB disk connected to the motherboard's SATA port.

Execute this in EMS (Adapted from here):

$(Foreach ($mailbox in Get-Recipient -ResultSize Unlimited  -RecipientType UserMailbox){
$Stat = $mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select TotalItemSize,ItemCount
    New-Object PSObject -Property @{
    FirstName = $mailbox.FirstName
    LastName = $mailbox.LastName
    DisplayName = $mailbox.DisplayName
    TotalItemSize = $Stat.TotalItemSize.value.ToBytes()
    ItemCount = $Stat.ItemCount
    PrimarySmtpAddress = $mailbox.PrimarySmtpAddress
    Alias = $mailbox.Alias
    }
}) | Select FirstName,LastName,DisplayName,TotalItemSize,ItemCount,PrimarySmtpAddress,Alias | 
Export-CSV C:MailboxReport.csv -NTI

Nikon Small World 2014 Image of Distinction

Be careful if you try to upgrade to Yosemite. Mine was stuck at "About a minute remaining" and I hard reset the Mac after 2 hours... Thought it was stuck.

It never booted again - I ended up having to restore from Time Machine: