Windows 7 - trying to restore acronis image fails, convert to vhd and boot?

for backups of my main OS (in my signature) I have acronis TIH create a single image full backup daily to a different drive. Weekly a single image backup is created and saved on a different drive. Because my SSDs are in RAID0, every few weeks I make a system image backup using Acronis (outside of the daily and weekly backups), clean/all the SSDs to put everything back to 0 on the drives, then restore my installation. It makes a significant performance increase for sure.

This last go around a week ago, I did the usual but could not restore no matter what I did. I bought the new version of acronis, the plus pack, unplugged all the other drives, etc etc etc that acronis told me to do to try to fix the error I was getting restoring any backups.

Finally what I did was take an old backup, transfer it over the network to a different computer, bought acronis TIH again (ridiculous) and was able to clone it to a drive, plug the drive back into my main rig, boot acronis from a USB drive and clone that installation to the SSD raid setup. The only problem was, the backup I was able to use was from 7-10. I'm now trying to convert the images which would not restore to VHD to boot from the bootmgr screen of the currently restored (7-10) installation.

Every tutorial I see only deals with creating a new .vhd to install windows to and boot. If I have these backups copied as .vhd already what do I do?

For the record, Acronis help desk is worthless. I bought >$100 of software upgrades which did nothing, and I will be getting my money back for them. Their first suggestion was to run chkdsk/r on all the drives before trying to restore. That took 4 days on my 2TB green drive, and didnt work anyways.

I'm 12 days into this problem and losing my mind over it.

I know that it isn't what you want, but it would be difficult to pick things up from where you have left off, because it seems somewhat complex to understand. I would suggest starting from the beginning, and detailing exactly how you went about the first attempt to restore with the backup, and if necessary continue from there if a solution isn't found.

Hi jorpe, I keep very little of my favourite things on C: drive. My personal stuff is stored on external hdd's. If I need quick access to any, its copied to partition D:
All my backups are done using Acronis 2010 'One Click Backup' to a new folder named as the date the image was made plus info of my settings and installed programs. A backup takes 8 minutes to do, restore in 5 minutes.
To date, its never failed.

Everything I have is synced a similar way. I use windows live mesh to sync everything important between my laptops, desktops, and business associates computers. All my media is on a different drive (and backed up elsewhere as well) so are all the downloads I've ever made. The annoyance is how it messes with my subscription music services, itunes, and office to have to go back to a way older backup. It completely messes up DRM.

Are we paranoid or just thorough?

I would say 45/55%

Is that ratio paranoid/thorough or thorough/paranoid?

The former.

My goodness there's no way this should have taken 4 days, even if you'd asked to "check for bad blocks"!?!?!?! I'd love to see the report from Windows' Application logs on this.