Follow up. I figured the problem might be the mobo. I took the boot drive, which is an ssd, and put it into a 6 year old Gateway W7 comp, with the plan of installing w10 there. I really didn't think my backups would then work there, since it was dissimilar hardware.

I didn't even have the chance to find out. It booted up right into my regular w10 version with all my data on it. Don't know how, since it's a different machine. Device Manager is clean. Everything works> Apparently, all the backups took, but the computer was bricked and couldn't boot them.