The Macrium image cannot be restored unless you first make and then use the Macrium Linux recovery CD. You make the disk using Macrium itself. After the disk is burned, you should boot your PC with it to confirm that it works and that you can see all of your partitions and the image file.
Without this disk, Macrium is useless.
Linux recover CD? Is that just what it's called or does it have something to do with Linux?
Both.
It contains a bootable version of Linux. You don't need to install Linux to make such a CD.
But you cannot restore an image with the free edition of Macrium unless you make and use this CD when the time comes.
The Hirens V14 boot CD has Macrium under it's mini XP environment. This can be used to restore Macrium images. But make the linux boot CD as well. I assume you've imaged your OS drive?
Re: partition D: do you think you have anything important on it and is there any reason it cannot be a regular NTFS formatted partition?
Here are help and links to download Unetbootin and Hiran's boot CD
How to Make a Hiren's Bootable USB | eHow.com
also instructions to make a bootable USB drive (flash).
I have no way to burn anything to disks on this machine (no CD drive), is there a way to recover from the image without having to make a disk?
Yes. you download a .iso file and Unetbootin and you create a bootable USB flash drive. I mentioned that in my previous post referencing the link posted. The Hiran's program had Macrium on it.
My only option is to restore from my HDD, I don't have any flash drives available.
You are missing the point. You can only restore an image of your system from a bootable CD/DVD or USB drive.
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