Windows 7: A little help with Macrium, please

That is what I also recommend for a worst case scenario.

PS: sorry if I misunderstood your earlier post. In the context of my previous discussion with the OP it appeared to me as if you meant to restore from an image that has no MBR. As I said, in my early Macrium days I tried that too. You live and learn.

I thought I had this clear after post 7 but now it's clouded over again ;-)

So, as SIW2 said: I make 2 separate images, one of my C partition and the other of my 100mb partition.

When (if) I have to restore C, I choose 'Do Not Replace' for the MBR

Right?

If so - how do I image the 100mb? It doesn't show up in Macrium.
Do I have to give it a drive letter? If so, will any not in use do and how do I do it?

Sorry for all the q's and thanks for all help.

Yes, the 100MB partition needs a letter. Either you assign it with Disk Management or Partition Wizard.

OK - all done! I spent a while moving photos - videos, etc. off C to make it smaller (that stuff is all backed up regularly anyway)
I took an image which seemed to go well (took 18 mins.) and now I've moved the extra stuff back again.

Thanks to everyone.

If you moved that to a data partition, you can image that partition too. I do this all the time since I have a data partition which is shared between my Vista and Windows 7 systems.

Wolfgang - I did think of that having seen your other tutorial. I wanted to get the system image done though.

Can I make more partitions? It seems Acer have already made a few - isn't there a limit? 3 or 4?
Please see my first post for disk management.

Yeah, there is a problem. It looks like thosae Acer people stuffed your system with 4 primaries already - and 4 is the maximum. You have to get rid of one of those first to get to a total of 3 primaries and then add an extended partition to which you can add many additional basic partitions.
Do in no case try to add a partition as it is now. That will automatically convert all your paetitions into dynamic partitions and that is a mess which is not all that easy to correct.

I'll leave it 'as is' at the moment - everything's fine - don't want to screw things up ;-)

Thanks again for the help.

OK Ken, we'll tackle the partition problem another day. Keep the Disk Management snip around. We'll need it for that.

I just realized that the E that's showing is my DVD drive and the F is my ISP (the dongle sticking in the side of my laptop)

Is it usual for these to show up as Primary partitions? Are they in fact PP's

I scrolled down a bit in the disk management window.